That's what

"The happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing," in the Jamesian way, means shutting up and listening not to words but to the rhythmic interpenetration of one's specific nature with the rest of nature. The occupational resistance of the chattering classes, especially the professorial branch thereof (lately rivaled by social media and the twittering classes), to such wordless silence is what so exasperated James and led him to declare:

“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry; but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. . . . In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.” VRE XVIII

A point-of-view gun, the one that gives its victim a fleeting glimpse of the assailant's interior life, would be so much more constructive.

Philosophy is by its nature "talkative and explicit," where nature is mostly mute and inchoate. It's wonderful that our corner of nature has fomented words, but we must remember that it's just a corner. The universe is so much richer, so much more extensive and uncharted. The limits of language are not the limits of the mysterious and beckoning world we've not yet explored. 

Teachers don't generally perceive the wisdom of this insight, since no institution will employ us to conduct classes the way John Cage composed 4'33"-nor would we want to, in our boundless garrulity. We really like to talk. 

But some of us are also impressed by that glimmer and twinkle of living perception, in whose vague but shimmering sparkle we find ourselves struck temporarily silent. We're then given to eruptions like this, especially late in a semester:

"What an awful trade that of professor is," James complained at term's end in 1892, "paid to talk, talk, talk! . . . It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." 

It gave me the greatest satisfaction in Chicago the other day to share that statement with my pedantic peers, and then Richard Ford's character Frank Bascombe's complementary POV in The Sportswriter.

Real mystery, the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book, was to [his teaching colleagues] a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away-live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble. . . .”

I started teaching at 23, stopped at 32, started again at 41, and now at 65 don't plan to stop just yet. But I do intend to spend my terminal teaching time defending Frank's "lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder"... defending experience against the invasive/reductive form of philosophy that disvalues it. That'll be my spiritual/academic last act.

Poetry is a worthy ally in this battle. Rorty seems to have begun to grasp this, when he said late in life that he wished he'd spent more time with it. I wish he had too, and that we'd had an opportunity to watch him take another "turn"--an alinguistic turn, not renouncing verbiage but acknowledging its larger context in life. One good turn deserves a better.

I'll try, in mounting my own late defense of experience, to erect no monumental explanations woven only of words. As WJ said, the best an honest philosopher can do in this regard is point to the that of life. Each of us must fill out the what for ourselves. 

That's what experience means.