It’s fine to talk about the importance of the humanities, but it’s finer to practice them. In the humanities of language and literature (two subjects which can be separated only academically), how well we come to appreciate what we’re reading depends to a great extent on how well we understand what the language is doing. Perhaps we can even say that the pleasure of reading lies in the grammatical details, because we are reading meaning as it is conveyed in a particular linguistic structure, with all that is both said and implied there. To find meaning, to understand the human condition and what values it embodies, is the inherently pleasurable work of the humanities. And we all, as Aristotle said, desire by nature to know.
The American novelist H. L. Davis wrote a short story entitled “Open Winter,” and the first sentence of the tale gives us a compact illustration of a prickly point of grammar: the participle. A participle contains a lot of information in a very compressed space, and understanding how it works can bring out implications folded into the explicit statement. Here is Davis’s opening sentence, which (conveniently enough for teachers) includes each of the three participles in English (I have italicized them for easier reference):
The drying east wind, which always brought hard luck to Eastern Oregon at whatever season it blew, had combed down the plateau grasslands through so much of the winter that it was hard to see any sign of grass ever having grown on them.
A participle is one of three kinds of verbals in English grammar (the other two being the infinitive and the gerund), and a verbal is nothing more than a word built from a verb but acting as a noun or an adjective. The term participle means taking a part, or portion, and its name refers to the fact that a participle has taken part of itself from a verb and part of itself from an adjective: hence, a verbal adjective. It’s an ingenious device, but it demands a little reflection to appreciate all the nuance it can convey.
The three participles in English are named present, past, and perfect. A present participle always ends with the suffix –ing (though not every word ending that way is a present participle). We read the word present in present participle and we no doubt think of time, but we will be taking the wrong road if we think here of time as what the clock on the wall says. That kind of time we call absolute, because past and future will mean something in reference to the actual present moment shown on the clockface. Participial time, however, is relative, not absolute, and it means a moment in reference to the time of the main verb of its clause, whatever that time might be. We might better call a present participle a contemporaneous participle, because the time it is depicting is felt to be present, or copresent, with the time of the main verb.
We as readers are to understand, then, that the drying east wind with which Davis opens his story was drying (that is, making dry) the grasslands at the same time that it had combed down the plateau. (The fact that drying precedes the noun east wind adds a twist to this explanation, but we can continue on confidently here without going down a path where even angels at the moment might fear to tread.) The verb phrase had combed down is the main verb of the sentence, and it is a past perfect tense, depicting a time prior to another verb (was in the succeeding clause). That past perfect tense is built by combining the auxiliary verb have (here in the form had) with the past participle of a verb (the second kind of participle), and so we see a picture in which the drying east wind had many times combed down, or destroyed, the plateau grasslands long before the time when it was hard to see.
But hard to see what? Not just any sign of grass, but grass having grown on the grasslands. The phrase having grown illustrates the third kind of participle, the perfect, which is constructed by combining the present participle of the auxiliary verb have (having) with the past participle of a verb. The term perfect in grammar always means completed and therefore past in some sense, whether absolute or relative, and since participles are a kind of adjective, grass having grown means grass that had grown before the time when it was hard to see. The verb had combed down in the main clause, therefore, is establishing the point of comparison with the present participle drying, and the verb was in the subordinate clause is doing the same for the perfect participle having grown.
There is no verb in the present tense in this first sentence, but time oscillates vitally from some moment in the past to a moment further in the past, up again to a more recent past, and back again to a time before that. All that temporal change creates mental energy as we read closely, and if we can give ourselves over to it as we feel the rhythm that the grammar signifies, our appreciation of the story (and admiration of the writer) is all the greater. And appreciation is a kind of intellectual pleasure, which disposes us to insight, the real purpose of the humanities.
***
Coming Up in February
Davis’s short story is one of five we will be reading and discussing in an upcoming new offering of Writing Smartly’s four-week online short course called Reading Closely to Write. As we have in the past, each week we will examine the grammatical structure and stylistic design of sentences from one or two short stories written by celebrated authors. Each story averages about fifteen pages, and our effort will be to see more deeply into the meaning and implication of the author’s written composition.
The exact dates and time of the course will be set in early January, but if you have questions in the meantime (or if you would like to express your intention to enroll), please email me directly at ultimo@writingsmartly.com.
A winter of reading to welcome the spring.
***