The novelist John Steinbeck wrote a short story called Flight, and in it Mama Torres, the matriarch of a farm below Monterey, sends her young son to the city for medicine and salt. “I would not send thee now alone, thou little one,” she tells him, “except for the medicine…. It is not good to have no medicine, for who knows when the toothache will come, or the sadness of the stomach. These things are.” Philosophy and its wisdom and language are everywhere, and we are reminded of that by this mother’s last sentence here. Were we not as philosophical as she, we might unguardedly ask, These things are what?
By the artifice of literature, this Mexican matriarch near Monterey is speaking English, and so we can learn a lesson from her about the troublesome verb to be without becoming too concerned about how that verb works in Spanish (a subtle affair in its own right). The notion of being sits at a very high peak of philosophy, where the air is thin and the ideas difficult to put words to. And as high as that mount might be, we use this verb more times a day than we can count. Let’s remind ourselves that some common forms in the present tense are: am, is, are, and in the past tense, was, were, has been, and have been. The phrase to be marks the infinitive of these finite verb forms.
We can be in two ways linguistically: we can exist, or we can exist as something. If I say, for example, that I am or that I am here, my intent is not to identify myself with anything, but to assert my simple existence or my existence somewhere. We can see this with a quick grammatical analysis of the second statement. The subject I is joined to the predicate am here, and in that predicate there is the adverb here. Adverbs express relations of some sort—temporal, spatial, causal, for example—and with the adverb here, the sentence intends to say something about the subject in relation to a spatial point: I am, or I exist, at this place.
Consequently, when the verb to be means to exist, it is classified grammatically as an intransitive verb. Such verbs do not have direct objects (something in the world to which their action is directed), but rather express an unaimed action or a state of being. When I say I am here, I am making a statement about my state of being, where I am existing at the time of the enunciation; similarly, if I say I run every morning, the action of running is not aimed directly to affect something else in the world (as it would be if I used the verb transitively, as in I run a small business), but rather to assert the action in and of itself, involving not something else, but only another relation, this one of time expressed by the adverbial phrase every morning. Likewise with the verb am in the sentence I am here.
But what if I said not I am here, but I am an astronaut. Analyzing this simple sentence, we now find the noun astronaut in the predicate. The presence of that predicate noun (or of a predicate adjective, for example, happy or excited or angry) changes what the verb to be intends to mean. In using this same verb with a noun or adjective in the predicate like this, my interest lies not is saying something about my merely existing, but rather saying something about what I exist as, or in the manner of. To say I am an astronaut is to say that I exist as an astronaut. It is to assert an identity between the subject and a noun (or adjective) in the predicate. When the verb to be is used in this way, grammar classifies it not as an intransitive verb, but as a copula, or what is sometimes called a linking verb. (The noun copula in Latin, the source of the grammatical terminology we have inherited, means just that, a link or rope or bind of some sort).
We have, then, three kinds of verbs, intransitive, transitive, and copulative. And when in speaking, with Hamlet, of the aches and shocks that flesh is heir to, Mama Torres said, “These things are,” she was not specifically identifying the human condition with anything else, but meaning to remind her son, and us, that such unnamed eventualities and their like do indeed exist, and perhaps suddenly so. Not saying so directly, she tells us all the more by her indirection that we should always be prepared and foreknowing.
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Reading Closely to Write
Writing Smartly Short Course
Wednesdays, February 5 through February 26, 2025
Beginning Wednesday evening, February 5, from 6:00 to 7:00 CT, Writing Smartly will offer again its four-week online short course entitled Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one short story (each averaging about 15 pages) written by a celebrated author.
We will analyze the grammar and composition of certain significant sentences, and consider how other designs the author could have chosen would have produced different effects. Our emphasis will be on the grammar and language of the reading so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own natural written voice. By considering linguistic forms closely like this, we can come to appreciate the craft of language, training ourselves to discern assumptions and question implications—all to become more thoughtful about what we read and hear.
New selections this term will be from Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (Dell Publishing, 1982), readily available at Amazon and elsewhere. Tuition for this four-session online short course is $300, paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or by personal check (please email me for the mailing address). Upon your registration, I will reply with a confirmation and the Zoom link for the course.
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