I had occasion in a recent post (The Mystery of Reason) to quote the British philosopher A. E. Taylor, who was commenting on the riches to be found in a certain dialogue of Plato. His sentence was as difficult as his insight, and it bears understanding to know how the author composed that sentence, because its grammatical structure directly serves his high purpose. Here is Taylor’s sentence again: On the character we bring with us into the unseen world, our company there will depend, and our happiness and misery will depend on our company.
The temptation in coming upon a sentence like that is just to ignore it, impatient that its meaning is not immediately apparent. But that is not playing fair with the writer. We should always presume, until proven otherwise, that the writer is dedicated to the craft of language, both knowledgeable in its particulars and sensitive to the subtleties it can evoke. Sentence design, simple or complex, is an outcome of the weave being woven: heavier thought may at times require a more intricate inlay, a brocade design to arrest our attention and call us to ponder an unfamiliar idea. Taylor’s sentence arose from his thinking about the manner in which Socrates faced his death and pondered a future life—a serious philosophical theme in the extreme—and his ruminations took him to what effect, desirable or undesirable, the character we build for ourselves from our first day to our last might have on both.
Given the gravity of that subject and the evident wish Taylor had as a philosopher to consider it more seriously than merely dramatically, he designed his sentence to prevent our gliding glibly through a topic most of us do not run to preoccupy ourselves with. Notice first that the sentence both begins and ends with a prepositional phrase: on the character and on our company. These two stress points of a sentence, the opening and the close, here carry the two antithetical ideas on which Taylor’s assertion relies—character (or lack of it) and the company it enjoys. Notice next that in the middle of the sentence, back to back to each other, are two independent clauses with the same verb: our company there will depend and our happiness and misery will depend.
If we schematize that layout, using the letter A to represent the two prepositional phrases and the letter B to stand for the two clauses, we can see the design more clearly: A B B A, which is known as a chiastic, or crossing, word order. It is a classic rhetorical device in which to arrange grammatical elements when a writer wishes to slow down the willing reader just enough to demand more mental energy on a steepish conceptual hill. Its opposite (A B A B), called interlocking, would simplify the assertion into an easier parallelism: On the character we bring with us into the unseen world, our company there will depend, and on our company our happiness and misery will depend. That choice, however, would have worked against the consequentiality of the context by configuring the layout of ideas more closely, but not exactly, to our colloquial voice. The cadence, too, falters, and that dulls the majesty of the idea.
Both these orders of elements, then, work against what we would first commonly expect, the subject + predicate word order in both clauses, not just the second one: Our company there will depend on the character we bring with us into the unseen world, and our happiness and misery will depend on our company. That’s much easier reading, but easier at the risk of not feeling the utter implications of the assertion. The logic remains the same, no matter the rhetorical design, but logic is only one part of communicable meaning. It is one thing for something to make sense; it is quite another for a reader to be moved by the sense being made. If conceptual clarity does not divine the depths of our will, where indeed character is formed, it remains barren, bright but ineffectual. The rhetorical design a dedicated writer like Taylor brings to the work of composition, though off-putting at times when we’re not used to such stylizing, can often be the sign that some new thought is presenting itself, laying down a challenge to consider a notion perhaps entirely new to us—the best of reasons to read deep thought patiently.
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