The root of our word studious means zealous. To study something originally means to attend to it seriously, earnestly, devotedly in the belief that what we are trying to understand can open a vision otherwise closed off to us by a merely casual acquaintance with the subject. In its original connotation, whatever we study will and can and must be put to use, because we can only be passionate about something we believe is important, if not even indispensable, to the way we live the life we are living, which includes not only action, but awareness.

This understanding of intellectual work is far upstream from what is called intellectualism, thinking and analyzing and conceptualizing for the sake of thinking and analyzing and conceptualizing—exercising the mind for the pleasure in feeling that click when we understand, when the pieces of a puzzle or the squares of a crossword all finally fit together. That is all a subtle (and unbecoming) kind of acquisitiveness. Studying, though, differs from intellectualizing in that something is at stake when we’re really studying. We feel we have to understand, because we’re looking not only for pleasure and possessions, but livable meaning as well.

It is important to make this distinction because the study of the language arts is often assailed with just this criticism, that grammatical and logical and rhetorical analysis, along with all of their special terminology, is a game some so inclined like to play, and that we can all get along just fine, thank you, with our natural responses to what we read and write. There is much to respect in this position, and there should be no question that our ingenuous response is primary; it is difficult work to set aside our presuppositions and give ourselves over trustfully to an author and a world contrived in words, and we should take pride when we accomplish it. But there are two good reasons for both the so-inclined and not-so-included to study the technicalities of language and literature: the securing of control and the deepening of appreciation.

To illustrate this, let’s look at a sentence at the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams.” After many episodes of infatuation and dejection, perhaps and no, yes and never, the protagonist Dexter has succumbed to understanding that his love for the extravagantly beautiful, contestably playful Judy is not to be realized. The first four sentences open the paragraph, but it’s that fifth sentence that holds a lesson for us:

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

Our ear will no doubt alert us right away to something unusual: the sun was gone down, instead of had gone down. A small change of one word and the kind of observation which those who do not see the value of reading closely will censure for its minuteness. But that tiny grammatical difference essentializes the imaginative world Fitzgerald wants us to see here, the baren, inactive inner world Dexter is despairingly living out as the story of a youthful dream concludes. We expected had gone down because the sun appears to us to move across the sky, and when we wish to depict motion in the past—a past here before the time tears were streaming down the character’s face—we employ some form of had to help build the past present tense. That standard tense is meant to show that something securely happened.

But that is exactly what Fitzgerald does not want to convey. In fact, nothing happened. The once luscious hope did not mature, and so Fitzgerald uses was, a form of the verb be, to denote a past state, a situation or circumstance or atmosphere in which the sun, the illuminator of all that is life, was present no longer to Dexter. And by including the adverb down, Fitzgerald is playing off the standard active construction of the past perfect tense. It will stumble us if we are reading too quickly: we’ll trip over his unexpected phrasing. But when we rub the dust from our eyes and look again more closely to see things from the angle Fitzgerald opened for us with an intelligent linguistic twist, we understand what we first had missed. And coming then to the last paragraph of the story, he will repeat a similarly constructed verb three times: but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. He means with such language to reflect again that abstract, joyless gray beauty of steel.

If we, as readers and writers both, are not familiar with these technicalities—the notions of tense and the ways the craft of the language can subtly suggest the difference of state over action—we can certainly still enjoy the story, but we preclude ourselves from a fuller appreciation, meaning a deeper insight, into the ideas which assembled themselves in a certain way in a particular writer’s mindful preoccupation. And too, without this, after all, reasonably manageable grammatical knowledge, we risk our own intelligent ideas taking on a life of their own and assuming a place in our sentences only when a well-worn phrase or trite expression seems good enough to express them. What knowledge of the craft of writing we can accrue by close examination of language, both our own and others’, will yield a proper control, the control of excess and imprecision, and this can be, ironically, the path back to our own spontaneity—just what we might have lost but can find again after a little zealous study of the craft of writing.

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New Thursday Postings

Later this week, Writing Smartly will begin a weekly Thursday post of a sentence or short passage from significant writers to keep good models of language and thought, like this one of Fitzgerald’s, present before us. At this late (let us hope not too late) date in human history, we have collectively accrued sentences and stories, poems and insights from every time and direction of human culture, a veritable embarrassment of riches from which we may find both pleasure and guidance. The aim of this new weekly post will be to preserve and promote a regard to the structure and style of language and the insight its intelligent study can provide—preservation through the reading and promotion through the recommendation of other authors to discover, examine, and read. Please look for the first installment this coming Thursday.

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