"What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same"

Antonio Porchia’s statement draws a profound distinction between the nature of words themselves and the fleeting quality of their immediate messages. Words, as linguistic forms and symbols, possess an inherent stability. They endure through time, across generations, and are reused indefinitely. The sounds and symbols, “love,” “death,” “beginning,” “end”, persist, forming the skeleton of human communication across centuries. Yet, what these words express, their content or message, is never identical. Each use is responsive to context, shaped by the intent, emotion, and situation of the speaker or writer, and further refracted through the perception of each listener or reader.

Porchia points to the paradox that while our vocabulary is finite and relatively fixed, the meanings we attach to words are constantly shifting, neither static nor permanent. Words act as vessels, universally available, yet what they carry is transient, subjective, and changeable. “What words say does not last”: words uttered in a particular moment respond to the immediacy of that situation, to the nuances of lived experience, and that experience evaporates. The words spoken, the message sent, becomes memory, and even the memory is altered by the passage of time.

Yet, those same words persist, unchanging in form, waiting to be reanimated with new meanings and different feelings. This highlights both the limitations and the miraculous flexibility of language; no momentary utterance or interpretation survives forever, but the tools we use, our words, continue their existence, ready to serve new thoughts, emotions, and revelations. The constancy of words allows for connection across temporal distances, even as it guarantees that each communication remains unique, a fleeting spark. Porchia’s reflection thus invites a meditation on impermanence, on the way meaning dissolves even as the means of conveying meaning endures, drawing attention to both the enduring and the ephemeral in the human experience of language.