Posts Tagged ‘Arcadia’
“The art of the parenthesis is one of the great secrets of eloquence in society”*…
Florence Hazrat, with an adapted excerpt from her recent On the Mark- From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World…
On October 16, 1586, a young man writes a desperate letter to his friend: “My dear Weyer: Come. Come. My life is in danger and I long to see you.” Weak from the festering wound in his thigh, he scribbles those few lines in a shaky, hardly legible hand. Will the famous doctor be able to save him? When Weyer arrives the next day, the letter writer is already dead. Sir Philip Sidney [here], courtier, poet, and fervent Protestant soldier under Queen Elizabeth I, had been fighting Catholic Spain in the Netherlands when a bullet struck him, burying itself deep in the flesh of his thigh. The life of the superstar of Tudor high society was cut short, at the age of thirty-one, in a way mirrored by his own writing: Just before leaving for his holy war, Sidney interrupted the epic story about errant knights [The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia or simply Arcadia], which he had been working on for years, in the middle of an exciting battle. He left the action hanging on a parenthesis.
Anaxius lept away. Whereat ashamed (as having never done so much before in his life)
Readers, like the sentence and the plot, are on tenterhooks about what comes next. The work, of course, remains unfinished. Even so, Sidney was merely following a common composition practice of pausing mid-sentence or mid-matter, and using the parenthesis as a memory springboard when it was time to pick up the pen again. Yet considering how his own life was cut short at the height of his social and literary success, it’s hard not to entertain interpretations of the interrupted sentence as an eerie omen…
… When Coluccio Salutati invented the parenthesis, nearly 200 years before Sidney perfected it, he rendered visible an age-old rhetorical practice of inserting a particle of a sentence into a greater whole. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian called it interpositio, drawing attention to putting something in the middle of something else. But one suspects that there is a limit for how long the mini-digression can become without hijacking the main sentence (or story). There was no rule on the length of a parenthesis; it was up to the discretion of the writer to adjudicate appropriate delay. It makes sense, then, that Sidney’s near-contemporary, the schoolmaster John Hoskins, writes in his Directions for Speech and Style (1600) that “all parentheses are in extremities, either graces or disgraces to a speech”…
… Parentheses, turning the inside of a sentence out and the outside in, ask readers to shuttle back and forth, exercising mental agility that nurtures a flexible set of thoughts and feelings. Sidney’s brackets include qualifications of the thrust of the main sentence, comparisons, doubts, metaphors, and examples, all of which dilate the narrative into a complex, three-dimensional woven tapestry, accommodating innumerable opinions and interpretations. The parenthesis in word and deed is an ethical way of life: We pause for thought.
There’s something mysterious about the “little moons”, as Erasmus called them. The moon has represented, in various traditions, creation and destruction, rebirth, eternity, the feminine, time, marking time, mystery, the night, and secrets. And so has the parenthesis. The convex-concave curves of the open and closed parentheses cup something said by the way, whisperings, secrets mouthed into the reader’s ear, mumbled under the author’s breath. For Renaissance writers, punctuation belonged to the visual-grammatical and the spoken-rhetorical. Headmaster and pedagogical author Richard Mulcaster categorizes parentheses as “creatures to the pen and distinctions to pronounce by”. They’re amphibian in striking out a precarious existence as belonging to both the water of the spoken and the land of the seen. The (two) visual walls make meaning discrete, even as they remain permeable enough for the eye to slip in and out. You can’t overlook a bracket. Yet you can also read right through it. How does one read a bracket? How does one read it out? Mulcaster suggested that “the words enclosed by them are to be pronounced with a lower and quicker voice than the words either before or after them.” Both visually and aurally, then, what’s inside nestles safely between parenthetical palms, protecting tender expressions of intimacy.
Brackets establish a special magic between reader and writer. Perhaps that’s why Sidney used them to dedicate his work to his sister Mary, a gifted translator and accomplished poet in her own right:
Here now have you (most deare, and most worthy to be most dear Lady) this idle work of mine: which I fear (like the spider’s web) will be thought fitter to be swept away, than worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks, were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulnes this child, which I am loath to father.
Sidney is hedging his words in ever more delaying parentheses. He adds comparisons (“like the spider’s web” and “as the cruel fathers”), classical allusions to Greek myth, and appeals to the reader (“most dear Lady”). Parentheses encase words, keeping vulnerable admissions safe and visually private. An open bracket is always twinned with a closed bracket — the words inside are never left out in the cold…
The uncontested early modern king of brackets and the place of the parenthesis: “Philip Sidney and the Extreme (Dis)graces of the Parenthesis,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
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As we interrogate interpositions, we might note that today is Ship in a Bottle Day.
Ship in a Bottle Day was first celebrated in 2013. October 4 was chosen in honor of Jack Hinkley, founder of the Ship in a Bottle Association of America, who helped promote and preserve this unusual maritime craft.
The tradition of building ships in bottles became especially popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Sailors often made small models during long voyages, using their knowledge of ships, rigging, wood, thread, and simple tools.
The secret is not that the bottle is cut open. In traditional ship-in-a-bottle construction, the model is built so the masts and sails can fold down. The ship is carefully inserted through the neck of the bottle, and then the rigging is pulled to raise the masts into place. The process requires patience, steady hands, and careful planning. – source
“The future, said Herzen, was the offspring of accident and willfulness. There was no libretto or destination, and there was always as much in front as behind”*…
Over the past few years, I have become increasingly interested in, and admiring of, plurality. Plurality—a condition of society in which people who hold widely different beliefs and are committed to quite different values nevertheless find some way to live in relative peace with one another—is to be distinguished from pluralism, which may be described as a conviction that a society in which people pursue a great diversity of ends is intrinsically superior to a more unified society. That I don’t believe. I think that our society would be better off if we were all united by a deeply shared set of convictions—my convictions, as it happens. (Imagine that!) But I would want such singleness of vision to be freely chosen, which will obviously never happen. So in default of my ideal, I say: Better plurality than tyranny, and better a tyranny presided over by others than a tyranny presided over by me.
From this point of view, the most zealous on the contemporary American left and the contemporary American right have something fundamental in common: They never ask the question, “Am I fit to rule others?” I see this self-blindness not only in electoral politics but also in intra-religious and academic disputes. They take it for granted that the rightness of their convictions makes them fit: that the justice of a cause can make a perfectly straight thing out of the crooked timber of their humanity. To be sure, I continue to say, better a tyranny presided over by others than a tyranny presided over by me; but I also say, better that none of those zealots ever achieve the power they lust for—because their very confidence in their right to rule is the most absolute disqualification for rule that I can imagine. This Alexander Herzen understood.
The central figure in Tom Stoppard’s great dramatic trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002) is Herzen (1812–70), the first Russian socialist. From exile in England, Herzen published The Bell, which the great American critic Dwight Macdonald, the editor of an English-language edition of Herzen’s memoirs, called “perhaps the most effective muckraking magazine in radical history.”…
What distinguishes Stoppard’s Herzen—which I think is a reasonably accurate portrayal of the real Herzen— from Marx and Chernyshevsky is simply that his thought is more historical than theirs. Both of them believed themselves to be deeply historical thinkers, but they had, in their different ways, settled on a complete and wholly enclosed understanding of the point that history is coming to, the point at which it will effectively conclude. They shared a sense of the telos, the goal, or end, of history...
Herzen… didn’t know where history was going or how it would get there. He understands himself to be in the midst of a great procession, one of many both before and after him to take up the cause of justice and freedom. History is plurality, even among those who share a commitment, a cause.
This is Stoppard’s image of the true scholar and the true activist alike. In Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia, Septimus Hodge consoles his pupil Lady Thomasina Coverly when she cries out in grief for “all the lost plays of the Athenians”: “We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short.” And Stoppard’s Herzen, near the end of this magnificent trilogy, finds the same consolation and expresses it with some of the same words, but even more concisely and beautifully: “The idea will not perish. What we let fall will be picked up by those behind. I can hear their childish voices on the hill.”…
Why the great Russian thinker refused to pick up the axe to advance his cause: “Alexander Herzen and the Plural World.” From Alan Jacobs, distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and proprietor of a consistently-interesting newsletter, Snakes and Ladders.
* Tom Stoppard, in an essay on Alexander Herzen
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As we ponder plurality, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that slavery was abolished in the British Empire, as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force (though it remained legal in the possessions of the East India Company until the passage of the Indian Slavery Act, 1843).
“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”, 1787 medallion designed by Josiah Wedgwood for the British anti-slavery campaign
“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry”*…
Jonathon Green’s unique edition of The Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose, first published in 1785
“Slang dictionaries have always been done by mad people who sit in rooms and make books out of them,” explains Jonathon Green. For 35 years he’s been doing just that: collecting slang words and compiling them into dictionaries.
The biggest of these—Green’s Dictionary of Slang, published in 2010—launched online this week. The online version is made up of 132,000 terms (the original print edition had around 110,000). Users can search for a word and its etymology for free, and subscribers can pay to access a bigger range of citations and a timeline of their evolution…
More of the backstory at “This man has spent 35 years compiling entries for a 132,000-word online slang dictionary that you can search for free.” Browse the dictionary here.
* G.K. Chesterton
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As we carefully choose our words, we might doff our hats to Elizabethan poet, courtier, and soldier Sir Philip Sidney, who died on this date in 1586 of an infected thigh wound received in combat with the Spanish at the Battle of Zutphen, after having given his leg armor to a soldier who had forgotten his own. As he lay dying, he gave his water-bottle to another wounded soldier, saying, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” Sidney’s Arcadia (or more fully, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia)– the inspiration for the Gloucester sub-plot in Shakespeare’s King Lear-– was published posthumously.
Attention, Frank Norris…
John Bull (England) as an octopus of imperialism (American cartoon,1888); source: HistoryMike
For more images of this provocative sort (and discussion thereof), see Vulgar Army, “an informal study into the use of the Octopus as an (often unreflective) metaphor in propaganda and political cartoons, and [of] the intersection of the political with popular culture.”
As we contemplate the role of cephalopods in civic discourse, we might doff our hats to Elizabethan poet, courtier, and soldier Sir Philip Sidney, who died on this date in 1586 of an infected thigh wound received in combat with the Spanish at the Battle of Zutphen, after having given his leg armor to a soldier who had forgotten his own. As he lay dying, he gave his water-bottle to another wounded soldier, saying, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” Sidney’s Arcadia (or more fully, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia)– the inspiration for the Gloucester sub-plot in Shakespeare’s King Lear-– was published posthumously.
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