Have we - we who have returned - been able to understand and make others understand our experience? What we commonly mean by ‘understand' coincides with ‘simplify’; without profound simplification the world around us would be an infinite, undefined tangle that would defy our ability to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions. In short, we are compelled to reduce the knowable to a schema: with this purpose in view we have built for ourselves admirable tools in the course of evolution, tools which are specifically the property of the human species - language and conceptual thought.

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved