Here is a short and beautiful passage from Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea, and in reading these masterful sentences closely, we can observe how a good writer prefers more often to tell readers what is going on, rather than simply tell them what is—to prefer, that is, action over being:
Now I hear the sea sounds about me; the night high tide is rising, swirling with a confused rush of waters against the rocks below my study window. Fog has come into the bay from the open sea, and it lies over water and over the land’s edge, seeping back into the spruces and stealing softly among the juniper and the bayberry. The restive waters, the cold wet breath of the fog, are of a world in which man is an uneasy trespasser; he punctuates the night with the complaining groan and grunt of a foghorn, sensing the power and menace of the sea.
A quick analysis of these three sentences reveals eight clauses, four of which have obvious principal verbs of action (hear, has come, lies, and punctuates), and two which have present tense forms of the verb to be (restive waters are and man is). The verb is after the noun tide in the first line is not a principal verb, but auxiliary to forming the progressive aspects of the two verbs rise and swirl, so we remain on solid ground in counting merely two instances of the verb to be across these eight clauses.
Now all of that basic analysis is a lot of busy work if we don’t next try to understand the effective difference between expressing action over being. Grammar teachers know (and perhaps some philosophy teachers as well) that no verb and no idea causes more trouble than to be and being. That’s because, I think, we unconsciously assume being—things, and we ourselves, obviously exist, right?—and so why would we need a verb, or even a concept, for it? The difficulty we have in understanding being, then, has to do, strangely, with our intimate awareness of it, and so to express it, or even try rationally to explicate it, only confuses our natural orientation to life.
Being, in other words, is the stage on which action takes place, and to spend too much time telling a reader what something is takes time and attention away from what that same thing is doing on the stage of life, and what consequences are resulting from its actions. Action changes the world, it moves the world, and since we are a part of the world, whether the actual world which confronts us or an imaginative one we wish to make ourselves a part of, we are the more interested and involved and concerned when we see things changing around us. We can see how to combine these two aspects of life in the concluding third sentence of Carson’s passage, where she says that the restive waters… are of a world in which man is an uneasy trespasser; the two verbs of being there work beautifully to convey the categorical manner of her belief. But note what she does then in the balance of the same sentence: she quickly reverts to the somewhat unexpected transitive verb punctuates in order to demonstrate what man does to be named an uneasy trespasser. To act, in other words, is to be.
That combination of being and action within the confines of a single sentence neatly illustrates, ironically, why we can go too far in saying that good writers avoid the verb to be. That is distinctly not true; one cannot write English without using some form of the verb to be. But it is true and helpful to say that good writers prefer action to being, remembering, as Carson did here, that things are what they are by virtue of what they do—at least in the art of language and some say even in life itself.
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