The purpose of what we’re writing will determine its style. Instructions are best left as simple and direct as the protocol will allow, but in a novel a lengthy passage meant to move the heart in describing a tender moment between lovers may take long and winding sentences to bring the scene poignantly before us. Much the same goes on in serious nonfiction in which writers try to induce a meditative frame of mind in their readers, such is the depth and implication of the ideas they wish us to attend to. In these cases it is incumbent upon us, a writer’s readers, not to prejudge, not to dismiss prejudicially the unfamiliar before we let ourselves be taken somewhere we might not expect. The grammatical road can indeed be long and winding, but that might be because the writer is trying to enchant us into unsuspected depths of meaning. To enchant us—not to bewitch us.
Here, for example, is one such absorbing sentence by the classical scholar A. E. Taylor in his short study Socrates. His purpose is to introduce, as the subtitle says, The Man and His Thought, and Taylor wrote it not for fellow scholars only, but for serious readers of the general public as well. The following passage comprises a one hundred thirty-nine-word sentence which opens his third chapter, so it begins by referring to the distance the reader will have already traveled with the author thus far:
If our attempted reconstruction of the life of Socrates during the period of which we know least has been successful, we have to think of him down to the age of forty as one of the most outstanding “intellectuals” of a great age of mental and moral ferment, distinguished in the circles specially interested in things of the mind by a profound concern for the unseen moral order and a religious faith not common in the society around him in God and the immortal soul, as well as by a highly original view of the nature of the problems of philosophy and the methods by which they should be approached, and naturally thought of by the wider public as an amusing eccentric, a combination of pedant, paradox-monger, freethinker, and necromancer, the character he wears in the Clouds of Aristophanes.
We should notice first that the opening word, if, signals a conditional (or hypothetical) sentence. The grammatical armature of such sentences has two parts: a conditional clause beginning with if, and the result clause beginning with then. Often, though, the word then is omitted, and that is the case here in Taylor’s elliptical version. See if you can find the position where it would otherwise appear. Remember, the purpose of such a towering sentence is to call us up to a height we might not be accustomed to enter, and so if you lose the thread as you read this for the first time, read it again slowly aloud. This is a technique we do not hear enough of: the written word is an attempt to re-present the spoken word. We hear meaning first, and then we see it.
We can find the missing then early on, right before the clause we have to think, and restoring it there will mark the beginning of the result clause. The grammatical and logical framework for this conditional sentence is quite simple: if our reconstruction has been successful, [then] we have to think of him as one of the most outstanding “intellectuals” of a great age. As strange as it may seem to us, the only claim a hypothetical makes is about the connection between two thoughts, not about the factuality of either the condition or the result. This is an important characteristic to remember about conditionals, because it is often too easy to be emotionally triggered by the idea in one of the clauses and stop thinking there and then about what is, after all, only a hypothetical, or theoretical, consideration.
Now there’s also a little bit of rhetoric in writing a conditional sentence as this passage opens. Taylor himself no doubt believes that his own reconstruction (referring to what the reader will have learned from him in the first two chapters) has of course been successful, but the fact that a hypothetical sentence does not speak to the reality of either its condition or its result, helps Taylor to blunt an otherwise too forward self-assertion. The construction here gives him a way to refer to his accomplishment indirectly and therefore graciously. Note, too, that he refers to our reconstruction, not my reconstruction. Those choices are subtle and deferential and civilized, because our attention is kept on the ideas and not on the writer Taylor himself. A refreshing thing to see.
The rich bounty of ninety-one words which gather after the complete hypothetical sentence, beginning with the adjective distinguished and ending at the period, constitutes a long sweep across all that Socrates’ life as one of the great thinkers of classical Athens entailed. And watch how the writer does not lose control of his work as he chooses from that gathering what he intends us to taste. Socrates was distinguished: by a profound concern, [by] a religious faith, as well as by a highly original view. And if he was distinguished by these three ideas, he was also naturally thought of as something else entirely by those who could not or would not understand him: an eccentric, a pedant, a paradox-monger, a freethinker, and necromancer. The adjectives distinguished and thought of work from the same grammatical level, each suspending under them the ideas that specify their meaning. It is this grammatical infrastructure which upholds our thinking as we proceed through Taylor’s thoughts.
So why all this intricate design? Sentences like this are monumental structures for monumental ideas. We could classify Taylor’s example as a cumulative sentence (an independent grammatical structure followed by a subordinate elaboration), but that would not suffice to answer why he chose, or more likely why he found himself naturally choosing, such an elaborate composition. A better explanation might be that he wanted us, his readers, to ruminate (the verb originally meant to chew) slowly over the fact that we can find in the person Socrates someone who himself ruminated, meditated, allowed himself to be veritably enchanted by the highest notions we humans can think about: an unseen moral order, an immortal soul, God as the Absolute. The skilled artist, here the accomplished writer, is trying unremittingly to match content with form, to see what one is saying reflected in the way it is being said. And that is why we must give Taylor his due in reading his sentence. What we might very well get in return is the surprise of seeing ideas we are only nominally familiar with from an entirely new angle of light and awareness and understanding.
The eminent French philosopher Étienne Gilson dedicated his work Painting and Reality to someone “who taught me to understand what I loved.” The sentiment is profound, because it means that we can love something even more if we understand how it is what it is (the very same which Juliet wished to know asking in wonderment wherefore art thou, Romeo?). But we should also realize that when we do not assume our right to look for an intelligible meaning in the forms we encounter—the grammar and logic and rhetoric beneath what we read, for example—we risk twin difficulties: we may reject out of hand what appears difficult or unfamiliar and thereby forfeit our chance to know more; or we may appreciate less insightfully than we otherwise could what we struggle to understand. The serious study of language and literature, even if only as an avocation, can save us from both eventualities, and we might even find our sympathetic enjoyment turn to a kind of love. Philology, after all, means just that: the love of language and literature.
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