According to Nietzsche, ‘[t]hat for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts.’ Or, as Dostoevsky put it, ‘I swear to you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have written that I really believe.’
What Nietzsche meant is once we are able to articulate a feeling, we signal that the emotions underlying it have died. Thus, when an individual professes their love for you, they prove themself to be a liar as the love they speak of will have ceased to exist.1
Harold Bloom contrasted Nietzsche’s statement with the following passage from Hamlet:
‘Our wills and fates do so contrary run.
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.’
Shakespeare here expressed the truism that reality and our longings are diametrically opposed. In the words of Professor Bloom, ‘desire and destiny are contraries, and all thought thus must undo itself’.
From these passages, we learn that speech will never reflect truth, and desire will never be realised.
Reality is thus the enemy of both word and thought as it will always contradict both.
I should note that this is a controversial interpretation of Nietzsche’s statement, championed by the late Professor Harold Bloom.