On the way down from Mount Le Conte, we stopped to hug a sun-warmed trunk, on the most beautiful day, climbing waterfalls and tiptoeing across fallen trees. This one still stood. With our cheeks against its bark soft as cotton, four arms stretched round its belly, we smelled its sap.

“Can you feel that?” I asked.

He smiled. A man of energy: the spiritual, not religious type. He could feel it—not what I felt, but something of his own.

“And then it dawned on him,” writes Camus, “that he and the man with him weren’t talking about the same thing.”

Because my tree isn’t his tree. Because her love isn’t his love, be it that they may love each other. And your sadness isn’t her sadness, because the other sees a different shade of purple than the purple you see. Nobody knows what you mean when you say it’s beautiful.

First, our experience is different: only I feel my feels; only you think your thoughts. Then our language is different: the same words we all speak don’t mean the same thing to two of us.

“The image he had tried to impart,” Camus continues, “had been slowly shaped and proved in the fires of passion and regret—this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, who pictured a conventional emotion, a grief that is traded on the market-place, mass-produced.”

The one-of-a-kind universe in your mind is only yours: to paint your complex world into one they could see, you might try to learn their color language and the connotations of their shapes, then make two translations, both impossible: first, from your own mind to the canvas, then from canvas to their mind. Like a hopeless game of telephone.