Where Writing Can Go

In the best of all worlds, our study of grammar and sentence structure should lead us out of the textbooks and into the precincts of literature and philosophy. All those rules and technicalities are right and good, but they are ultimately instrumental, there to serve a purpose higher than themselves. Without them, of course, we flounder; with them, however, we find solid footing from which to reflect on what a text may mean and imply.

A student of mine illustrated this close relationship between structure and meaning recently when he asked about the punctuation of this opening sentence of the chapter entitled “Baker Farm” in Thoreau’s Walden. This quotation of forty words represents only about one quarter of Thoreau’s entire sentence (it covers some twenty lines of printed text), which never once loses its poise and balance. Should there be that comma after groves, my student wanted to know:

Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them….

All the marks of punctuation in English, from comma through semicolon to period, are meant to pace the run of ideas moving across the reader’s attention. Just as we know that an aircraft cannot lift off the runway unless it is moving, so a sentence cannot convey meaning unless the reader’s eye is setting off through its words and phrases. Unlike the pure physics which govern winged flight, however, syntactical flights of fancy or fact must take regard not only of logic, but of emotive impressions as well. This is why the study of writing speaks of both logical and rhetorical punctuation, the former concerned to make clear what is being said and the latter interested in how that meaning is touching the reader.

The comma after groves dissociates that noun from the adjacent participle standing, which as a participle is modifying that noun in order to make the comparison of the groves, or more properly the pine groves, to temples. The comma frees the participle from that immediate reference, running the risk that the reader will think that the subject I is instead what is standing like temples. Were this passage to be brought up on charges only under the statutes of logical punctuation, there would be little hope beyond throwing it all on the mercy of the court: the participial phrase standing like temples is certainly meant to name a defining characteristic of the pine grove, even there in the predicate position, and such restrictive modifiers are never to be set off by commas.

But is the phrase standing like temples in fact certainly meant to define the pine groves? What is certainly certain is that Thoreau thought surely he could rely on the reader to follow him past the laws of punctuation and still logically equate those temples with the plural pine groves and not the singular I. The letter, after all, killeth. By isolating the otherwise restrictive phrase standing like temples and, for that matter, its alternative comparative phrase or like fleets at sea, Thoreau is sailing under the flag of rhetorical punctuation, whose authority will allow bending—but not breaking—the steel-cold rules of logical punctuation. It’s all a delicate matter of perception and expression.

As the English novelist and poet John Cowper Powys said a century ago now in The Meaning of Culture, “To philosophize is not to read philosophy; it is to feel philosophy.” We can misunderstand that and believe that the right way to do things is nothing more than a matter of how we personally want to do things. But when we do not forget the objectivity of the world we are writing amidst, we can understand Powys’s complementary thought:

The art of self-culture begins with a deeper awareness, borne in upon us either by some sharp emotional shock or little by little like an insidious rarefied air, of the marvel of our being alive at all; alive in a world as startling and mysterious, as lovely and horrible, as the one we live in.

I think so. And to write with that in mind is to hope to write as masterfully as Thoreau did.

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