You close your eyes as you take in a whiff of the freshly cut grass, the silky aroma brings you into nirvana; a peaceful, euphoric state of tranquility. Your best friend Jake, however, is standing enviously right behind you; he’s got a blocked nose, meaning he’s unable to enjoy the heaven which you can.
You chuckle to yourself and decide to describe the smell to him, then he will at least have a chance to imagine it.
So you tell him, “It smells nice and sweet.”
You receive a blank look in response, you probably need to elaborate.
“It smelled natural,” you say, closing your eyes and reliving the moment. “Just like the spring itself.”
Jake opens his mouth, pausing on the tip of the question before letting the words free.
“What does that smell like?” He asks with a very, very puzzled face.
You’re about to respond with something, and that’s when you realise you can never fully describe your experience to Jake. Words are just words, and to experience something, you have to experience that thing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who introduced the idea of ‘private language.’ A word can mean different things to different people. The scenes that you picture in your head when you read, listen or write aren’t the same for everyone else. Just as everybody has a favourite food or a stance on current politics, everybody has their interpretations of words. We might be told the word ‘tree.’ I might imagine a lone maple tree on a hill. You might see a small well-kept bonsai tree. And the person at the back of the room might be exploring a vast, lush forest.
Real-life experiences can change words for people. A ‘tree’ is a plant for most of us, but for the Vietnamese soldiers of the second Indochina war, dense jungle trees were their secret weapon to success in battle. And to the opposing American soldiers, the talking trees were their terrifying pathway into battle neurosis.
The Search for WondLa is the first installment in the epic sci-fi trilogy WondLa. It tells a story about a girl called Eva Nine, who has spent all twelve years of her life in isolation. She is raised by a robot and has never even seen the sun. However, one day a large creature, who we find out later is known as Besteel, attacks the Sanctuary, and Eva is finally shown the outside world. This introduction of the main character is relevant to my own story. Though my ‘isolation’ was not having many friends and the large creature was the wellbeing team who helped me build social skills.
Throughout the trilogy, Eva Nine also matures and grows up from her childlike thinking of the first book. I think this specific development of her character is similar to my own as well. Not too long ago, just last year, I was very short-sighted and I often made irrational decisions just because I felt like I wanted something. For example, I would always leave important tasks, such as assignments or even eating food, because I instead wanted to sit at my computer and play games.

Descriptions of the landscape and cities are breathtaking and having read many fantasy novels, the world of WondLa can be vividly pictured in my head. From my perspective, this series is comparable to one of my childhood favourites: the Star Wars series. I love stories that build up magnificent worlds for you to escape to.
Compared to The Battle for WondLa, George Orwells’ Animal Farm does not go out of its way to describe vast, epic landscapes. Instead, it focuses on the political plot of the story, where animals overthrow the humans, but slowly, with time, the equality among them becomes corrupted.
Contrasting the two, where WondLa’s world paints magical, fantasy-filled scenes in my imagination, Animal Farm’s descriptions are very black and white, it does very little to describe look and feel. However, this kind of language creates a different kind of picture for me. Instead of not thinking about the scene, I interpreted this kind of language and vocabulary in a way that made me picture a black and white photograph from post world war 2.

Similar to Animal Farm, The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells is also written in this manner. However, H.G. Wells describes things in much more detail, for example when Prendrick, the main character believes that he is ‘lucky that a man died, and […] also [lucky] for himself,’ he goes to note that ‘there [was also…] a small beaker of water and some soddened ship’s biscuits with [them] […].’
In Animal Farm even the political metaphors spoke out to me. In our real world, we are supposed to ‘All [be] equal, but some […] are more equal than others.’ Just as in our world, those animals declare themselves to be equal, but eventually the greed and power get to them and that’s when it all crumbles down. Animal Farm also comes with its share of what I take to be life advice, which I wish I knew beforehand. A young me would look at the internet and see popular identities do stupid things that were meant to look ‘cool’. And the world of ‘cool’ was where a young me always wanted to be. Yet in Animal Farm when the animals finally gain the power that the humans had, they still “remember also that in fighting against man, [they] must not come to resemble him. Even when they have conquered [man], [they] not adopt his vices.” Most of the animals followed this rule and unlike young me, had common sense.

Real-life experiences and memories can aid our journeys in reading. They create new ways for us to see and interpret words, and just as me, the writer, and you, the reader, have different perspectives, everybody else does too.
