[Prestidigitweeze]

Does anyone else find it annoying when an author makes excessive use of phrases indicating that words can't express a particular action, idea or event? H.P. Lovecraft seems an exception (since his attempts to convey realms of sensation and emotion which are common to the Old Ones but beyond the capacities of human beings are so unintentionally amusing they approach a different kind of transcendence), but I particularly hate sex scenes, glimpses of the horrific, and spiritual epiphanies that end with the phrase "beyond words" or "and then no words were needed" -- either of which seems more coy than a 1940s film's sudden focus on a distant palm tree in the window of a hotel room.

Here's what I want to say when a writer ends a chapter or passage with phrases like, "and then no words were needed":

If no words were needed to express what happened, then why have you just said so in words? Why can't you be arsed to do your job: Find a telling place to end the scene and imply the very thing which you've just assured us does not need saying?

When a writer makes excessive use of phrases like beyond words, I tend to stop reading and open a book by another writer -- one who demonstrates that things can be expressed (else why would we read about them?).

In his novel, Time Must Have a Stop, Aldous Huxley shows his version of the thought processes and experiences of a character who dies, leaves his body and is reincarnated as a baby who remembers nothing. If Huxley can do that, then what's the excuse of a neo-beat poet, pseudo-transgressive romance writer or breathless horror novelist?