This obsession with being vigorously economical is a utilitarian approach to language; when coming from a journalist, that’s understandable. Last year, ABC journalist Sarah Ferguson said of a Four Corners episode about the ABC’s own senior management challenges: “I shouldn’t use adverbs because they’re bad for the language, but it’s extremely fair.”
But we look to novelists, do we not, to provide a beat; a pause to reflect on what it means to be human. Rather than fixating on pace and purpose, they provide us with depth. They take an English-lover’s approach to language, rather than a mathematician’s.
You can learn basic grammar and vocabulary at any age. That explains my “good enough” French. But there’s also an enormous amount of low-frequency words and syntax that even native speakers might encounter only once a year. Knowing any one of these “occasional” words or phrasings isn’t essential. But in every context — a book, an article or conversation — there will probably be several. They’re part of what gives native speech its richness.
In other words, no matter how many sentences I memorize or words I circle, there will always be more. “You can get pretty good pretty quickly, but getting really, really good takes forever,” Dr. Hartshorne explained.
Smith is not going to ride out this tumultuous political moment artistically, as if she were a car parked under an overpass during a storm. She’s delivered a bracing if uneven novel, one that, like jazz, feels improvised. “Spring” is tendentious at times, but it taps deeply into our contemporary unease. It’s always alive.
Life bursts through all of Oliver Sacks’s writing. He was and will remain a brilliant singularity. It’s hard to call to mind one dull passage in his work — one dull sentence, for that matter. At the end of this book, and very near the end of his life, in “Filter Fish,” he even manages to give gefilte fish, of all things, a wonderful star turn: “In what are (barring a miracle) my last weeks of life — so queasy that I am averse to almost every food and have difficulty swallowing … I have rediscovered the joys of gefilte fish. … Gefilte fish will usher me out of this life, as it ushered me into it, 82 years ago.”
Over the years, Shakespeare’s art has been praised for many things. But to the best of my knowledge, it has never been singled out for its classicism. In the famous judgment of Shakespeare’s rival and occasional drinking partner, Ben Jonson, the Stratford man had “small Latin and less Greek.” For Jonson, Shakespeare’s accomplishments were of a different order: the gift, not of painstaking study, but of natural talent and the determination to represent the experience of the world in all its complexity. As such, he was a true original — one who, moreover, showcased the confidence, flexibility, and newfound dignity of the English language. In the later 17th century, John Dryden saw in Jonson’s vision not only a vindication of modern literature as against that of the ancients, but an elevation of English drama above the heavily classicizing French canon of Molière, Corneille, and Racine. It was precisely Shakespeare’s lack of interest in decorous formality that set him apart. Like Homer before him, he might occasionally nod or go a bit far, but like Homer he had embarked on a voyage of poetic discovery. The Romantics were irresistibly drawn both to Shakespeare’s works and to the idea of their author as a prodigy of imaginative freedom, and as Bardolatry became a global religion over the course of the long 19th century, the popular image of Shakespeare as a genius of transcendently natural creativity took hold.
In truth, Jonson had a point. Relative to many of his contemporary poets, dramatists, and historians — the showily erudite Jonson foremost among them — Shakespeare can by no means be thought of as learned. The rub is that what could be described as having “small Latin and less Greek” in the early 17th century would, translated to the 20th or 21st centuries, look saturated in antiquity. Shakespeare had probably read and digested more Greek and Roman literature than most present-day Classics graduates.
Go towards starshine
& meet me at dusk.