Whether you understand much or little of what the following sentence by the art historian Herbert Read is saying will scarcely matter for our grammatical purposes here. What concerns us is the shape, or construction, of this architectural sentence, understanding which can make us both more sophisticated readers and acute thinkers.

Read is prefacing here a collection of essays (Aspects of Form, 1951) on the impossibly difficult subject of form in the natural and artistic worlds, and he wants to affirm the increasing scientific conclusion that in nature and art, we humans both perceive and perceive meaning by recognizing patterns. The idea has been standing for a long time, Read says, but it has been spottily recognized and inconsistently explained. He then launches a formidable ninety-word sentence whose blueprint we must understand both to appreciate and profit from. So, sit up straight, take a deep breath, and begin:

But now the revelation that perception itself is essentially a pattern-selecting and pattern-making function (a Gestalt formation); that pattern is inherent in the physical structure or in the functioning of the nervous system; that matter itself analyses into coherent patterns or arrangements of molecules; and the gradual realisation that all these patterns are effective and ontologically significant by virtue of an organisation of their parts which can only be characterised as aesthetic—all this development has brought works of art and natural phenomena on to an identical plane of enquiry.

I, for one, could add no more than a nickel’s worth of intelligent commentary to the idea Read is alluding to here, but to understand the structure of this sentence and to learn literarily from its construction, we need little more than to comprehend the basic meaning, not the philosophical complexities, of the words he is using. Read’s sentence beautifully examples certain design techniques we can incorporate into our own sentences, while at the same time illustrating the thesis he is expounding about the significance of recognizing patterns.

We should see first that this one sentence comprises two independent clauses, the first hidden in the four opening words (more on that in a moment), and the second after the dash. What stands between these two points are the four subordinate clauses beginning with the conjunction that, and a fifth relative clause (beginning which can) making up a subsidiary part of the fourth that clause. Our first sketch of this extensive sentence, then, lays down these three pins: main clause + five dependent clauses + independent clause, and that will stabilize Read’s quite involved assertion within the bounds of one enunciation.

The first main clause, But now the revelation, is an elliptical clip of But now the revelation comes, where the simple subject revelation has the hidden verb comes (or some similar verb) as its predicate. The ellipsis, along with the initial coordinating conjunction, whips onto their circus platforms the four pondering subordinate clauses to follow, each of which constitutes a noun clause standing in apposition to the noun revelation. Because of their weight, that is, the substantial idea each is articulating, they are separated by semicolons, not commas, and this is the rule when any one such series of clause has internal punctuation of its own (here the parentheses in the first one). Substitute commas for a moment and read the sentence again; you’ll see how the discipline of those grammatical animals falls apart and they begin to run around pell-mell on stage.

The fact that each of these four subordinate clauses begins with the conjunction that (I am regarding the phrase and the gradual realisation as just a synonym for revelation) is rhetorically significant. Beginning three or more clauses with the same word or phrase constitutes a figure of speech called anaphora, a common way, despite its forbidding name, to construct involved sentences (politicians are particularly fond of it). The technique works to establish a parallelism in the sentence structure, which is inherently organizing and therefore likely to render the assertion more authoritative and trustworthy. What is orderly is rational and what is rational is meaningful (whether in the end morally good or not).

Finally, the dash. We use it primarily to emphasize an idea, whether logically or emotionally, by separating, but not isolating, it from the previous thought from which it arises. A dash produces energy in a sentence by breaking the syntax already established, and when Read attaches the independent clause at the end of the long, subordinated statement with this device, he means to summarily announce the result of all the developments he has just presented. Of course he could have simply put a period after aesthetic, erased the dash, and begun a new simple sentence. That choice, however, would have moved the reader’s attention to another corner of the stage where the thought was taking shape on its own; the conditions (all those subordinate clauses) and their combined result (this final independent clause) would have been separated and the energy dissipated from the two placed astride each other, as we now read it in the original.

If it is true that we master a skill by watching a master work, then a little practice like the one we undertook here can make us more confident in both reading and writing more intricate sentences involving complex ideas. Making something well, be it a pot of clay or a sentence of words, ultimately depends on the way we bind together the what we want to express with the how whereby we do it. When something is difficult, even unfamiliar, first look closely at its form. Structure isn’t everything, but without it, there will be little meaningful to discover.

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It seems to be agreed by those who know that what we call thinking is a kind of comparing. When we think, we are trying to understand what something is, to consider how it may be like or unlike something else we already know. And in thinking about a larger problem involving many things, we are simply connecting one comparison to another comparison, building up an understanding in the same way we might knot threads to make a net: each node is a comparison, a thought, and taken all together they comprise a context to comprehend in the ensemble.

One kind of comparison is called a simile, with which we intend to show how one object may be like or as another. We use similes all the time to express our thoughts, and one way to understand how they work is to compare the simile to another kind of comparison called a metaphor. (The term metaphor means carry across in its original Greek, and so the picture is that we are taking something as it is in one context and bringing it unchanged into another context.) Where the simile compares two objects, the metaphor identifies them. I might describe someone of uncommon self-possession and arresting presence by saying that he sits in his chair like a king on his throne, and in putting my thought that way, I would be employing a simile. But if I said instead, with perhaps a bit of annoyance, he’s a king on a throne when he sits in his chair, I am not comparing this person with another, but rather saying that the two objects, person and king, are one and the same—at least in the world of my conscious imagination.

Simile and metaphor are two figures of speech in the linguistic rhetorical kit to design and style sentences. Figures, or a better term might be configurations, of speech are ways of arranging language to convey its rational meaning in a vital image, embodying an idea the way a body incarnates a human presence. To say that someone sits in a chair like a king on a throne phenomenalizes the baldly factual statement he looks self-possessed and unapproachable when he is sitting in his chair. A simile has more energy about it than the identifying metaphor, at least in the sense that comparing two different things will imply tension or conflict, because two objects are never the same in every respect and two things which are truly identified as one thing are never in conflict with each other. No conflict, no energy.

To see how the simile can be handled masterfully, let’s look at a passage from the British writer Charles Morgan’s novel The Fountain. This work of Morgan’s, along with another entitled Sparkenbroke, we could call a philosophical novel; both are slow moving, deep, and reaching works about inalienably human concerns, in this novel love and in the other death. In The Fountain, the protagonist, Lewis, after a conversation with an old “incurious” aristocrat who “hated the labour of imagination,” marvels at a mind so gravely closed down to life and its beauty. He was one of those men, Lewis is thinking here, who are

capable of cutting distractions out of their lives as a gardener cuts out weeds, thus enabling the narrow plots of their activity to be sturdy, ordered and fruitful. But to live with such a man and in a world commanded by him?

The conjunction as establishes the simile, and what makes this so well constructed an instance of it is the elaboration of thought which the comparative image makes possible. The old aristocrat had certainly cultivated his mind with all the singlemindedness a gardener does his plots, but what depth it had was at the expense of sympathetic breadth. To be sturdy and ordered and fruitful all have their place and virtue, and we can respect the work accomplished across a life to achieve those depths, as we do the gardener’s patient effort and its bounty. But such a close simile gives us pause in the end as we wonder whether the gardener’s necessarily narrow plots show up merely as an unnecessary narrow-mindedness when the old aristocrat stands (as perhaps too an old king sits) by comparison.

A beautifully and thoughtfully drawn simile, energetic in its compression and fruitful in its implications. A good writer thinks abstractly but expresses concretely, ever the difficult needle to thread. When we can write, as Morgan did, with such poise that our common voice carries an uncommon timbre, rich and resonant, we’ll know we’re on our way.

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There are, in the end, matters more profound than culture, but every civilized community must yet possess some set of principles to last. What we think of as a people’s culture was originally a shared object of worship (we can sense that meaning still in our word cult), but we use the word now to mean something more abstract: a group of values or assumptions more or less consciously held which define for a group what the world is and what in it is, and is not, important enough to attend to.

The hyper-individualism we seem boundlessly committed to at present has broken a small number of anciently old human cultural values into a kaleidoscope of shiny personal aspirations, each of us holding our attention to our own bright objects of attraction and desire. But culture properly so called is not an idiosyncratic vision one imposes by oneself upon the world, nor is it even, at the other end of the scale, the universal and transcultural vision the philosophers call insight, by which they mean that one truth which every human culture intends to manifest. Between these two extremes, a people’s culture in its traditional acceptation is what makes one reasonable, because what we think and what we do will be in reference to the independent truth of things—as things stand without us. And therein lies, particularly at present, its urgent importance to understand.

In an essay titled Quantity and Quality in American Education, the twentieth-century American philosopher Brand Blanshard places this value of reasonableness at the heart and purpose of education:

It is a firm conviction of mine that the characteristic which a college should aim above all to produce is reasonableness. What does reasonableness mean? Not skill in reasoning, though it is always the better for that. It is not even wholly a matter of the intellectual side of our nature, though a trained intelligence is essential to it. It is the pervading habit and temper of a mind that has surrendered its government to reason. On the intellectual side it shows itself as reflectiveness, the habit of examining the meaning of a proposed belief, and looking to its grounds and consequences, before accepting it. On the practical side it is justice, a scrupulous regard for the rights of others as well as of oneself.

There is much to think about here, not least Blanshard’s strict qualification that education should aim to produce such reasonableness, that this should be its goal even while recognizing, as he does in his succeeding paragraph, that institutional education “cannot guarantee greatness of mind.” Still its work is to “put pictures on the wall and point at them, and then hope that in our sluggish hearts and minds admiration will begin to stir.” All this is another version of the critic Lionel Trilling’s remark that schools and their scholars must “keep the road open,” so that the artifacts of culture, whether plastic or scholastic, can point those who wish to the vision which inspired their making. But the rest of us, in our modern and isolated skepticism, might very well ask whether there really is anything behind all those cultural creations other than ourselves.

That doubt, I think, gets to the heart of what the ancient notion of culture was and what is so important now to understand correctly. Culture properly so called has to do with seeing precisely what is not ourselves. It is not the result of what we personally conjure up in our imagination and then present to the world, trying by an individualized effort to make life meaningful or at the least endurable. It is rather what we make and how we act as an image of the truth we unearth in our dealings with others and the world; only then does our rightly personal form and stamp become a meaningful cultural effect. Under this definition, culture is a paradoxical venture: in language and art and the unapplied sciences, we are to look for the unequivocal truth of things which, though other than ourselves, is still cognate to us. This findable meaning, the real object of a genuine culture, remains mysteriously not our own working selves, but the source of them, which is why we call real values principles, the sources or unprovable axioms of all we subsequently think and do. And what constitutes culture must and will in the end ring us round to our own depths, to a more profound comprehension of what it means to be together as human beings in a particular community we share. And therein lies the irony: we are to look beyond ourselves to find ourselves.

Reasonableness is ultimately the result of awareness, and the works of culture, those “pictures on the wall,” are the objects we must reflect upon in our best minds to catch a glimmer of what lies behind all that we do and truly make. There is no more a culture for culture’s sake than there is an art for art’s sake. The traditional notion, at least, has been that the best work is a collaboration of sorts, material with maker and maker with truth. In that pattern, reasonableness will both guide and create, and the pictures we paint and the words we write and the songs we sing and the dances we dance can temper the aggressive loneliness which will otherwise storm the streets to deny the life it knows in its bones it has missed. Culture, instead, says yes, and yes again to the bright array of life. And in doing so, it makes us reasonable and, as Blanchard says, scrupulous over the rights of others.

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Beginning Monday evening, February 9, from 6:00 to 7:00 CT, Writing Smartly will offer again its four-week online short course entitled Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one short story (each averaging about 15 pages) written by a celebrated author.

We will analyze the grammar and composition of certain significant sentences from each story, and consider how other designs the author could have chosen would have produced different effects. Our emphasis will be on the grammar and language of the reading so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own natural written voice. By considering linguistic forms closely like this, we can come to appreciate the craft of language, training ourselves to discern assumptions and question implications—all to become more thoughtful about what we read and hear.

New selections this term will be from Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (Dell Publishing, 1982), readily available at Amazon and elsewhere. Tuition for this four-session online short course is $350, paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or by personal check (please email me for the mailing address). Tuition this term will include one optional 45-minute session of private instruction where you may discuss your own writing, or learn more about the points of grammar and style we discussed in the course. Upon your registration, I will reply with a confirmation and the Zoom link for the course.

I hope you can join us as we all await the spring.

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Writing is a pictorial art. We are to make pictures with the words we choose and the patterns we contrive with them. Our minds, for good or ill, have a habit of depicting what we see in the world as an array of things, each named by a certain noun and each undertaking an action called by a certain verb. And without asking with the philosophers whether all those things really do exist as realities in and of themselves, the writer draws up a sharp-edged scene for the reader to see those things acting in a particular way—in just the way the good writer intended the attentive reader to see them.

Take, for example, this homely, workaday sentence: Have you been hearing a beep go off every once in a while in the basement lately? We can picture the scene without much hesitation and we can surmise rightly enough that some device, probably a smoke detector, needs a new battery. We’re helped to that conclusion and to the liveliness of the event by the grammatical structure the writer has chosen, and though we would likely have come to the same deduction through another, duller arrangement of the words, we would not have arrived there in the same unquestionable manner: Did you hear a beep go off in the basement every once in a while? So what is the difference between this version and the original?

The difference lies, of course, in the way the question is posed. To ask have you been hearing depicts the action as ongoing over time in the past. Structurally this involves here two grammatical devices: the present perfect verb tense and the progressive verbal aspect. English grammar recognizes six tenses, four of which have to do with the past, and though we often like to think of the past as dead and gone and relevant no longer (and oftentimes thankfully enough), English gives us a number of ways that will determine how we remember what has occurred and how we talk about the past in the present. The simple past tense points to the happening itself (did you hear); the past perfect connects a past action to another time in the past already mentioned (had you heard); the future perfect tense refers both to the future and the past (will you have heard); and the present perfect, illustrated in our first example, points to a past which is so recent that it is felt to be almost present.

Our two versions (have you been hearing and did you hear) reduce those four possibilities for a past tense to two (the other two will not fit the logic of the scene), so already we have a way to guide our choice between the versions we’re considering. The nature of the event—the fact that a device like a smoke detector will send out an intermittent sound to alert one of a low battery—happens on the borderline of the past and the present: its recency and  repetition are what the question is about, and so the present perfect tense is the right choice, because its purpose as a tense conforms to the nature of the event it is employed to represent. But the pure form of this present perfect tense is have you heard, so why has the writer transformed this standard structure into have you been hearing?

This has to do with the other grammatical device illustrated here called aspect. A grammatical aspect refers to the way in which the reader sees the written picture, the angle of the writer’s point of view we could say, and English recognizes three such verbal aspects: simple, emphatic, and progressive. The simple aspect is just that, simple and unadorned: did you hear? The emphatic normally employs the verb do (I did hear it), but because our example is a direct question, which in English is built using that same verb do, we would have to substitute an adverbial phrase to configure the emphatic aspect to avoid two instances of do: did you in fact hear? And the progressive aspect, the one in our example, uses some form of the verb be (been) together with the present participle of the main verb (hearing) for the express purpose of elongating the verbal action over time: have you been hearing?

And that elongating, or pulling out, of the action corresponds exactly to the nature of the event the writer wants to depict. A perfect match, in fact. But the alternative we’re considering, did you hear a beep go off, is the lesser choice because the reader is being asked to do the work the writer should have taken on, and to impute into the simple past verb in the simple aspect (did you hear) the ongoingness which is at the heart of the event. That is exactly the picture which combining the present perfect tense and the progressive aspect produces.

The second version breaks the bargain always implicit between writer and reader: the writer is to hold the reins while the reader pays attention and is carried along. The minute the reader starts reaching for the reins, something’s gone wrong. And even though all of us are tempted to say, well, we know what the writer meant, that sets the bar for good writing too low. It’s not just a matter of what the writer is saying, but of how it’s being said as well; only those two together—both the logic and the style—can show and share the human moment as alive and moving. This is what is meant by the adage that precision is at the heart of style.

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A New Short Course Begins Next Week

Beginning next Monday evening, February 9, from 6:00 to 7:00 CT, Writing Smartly will offer again its four-week online short course entitled Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one short story (each averaging about 15 pages) written by a celebrated author.

We will analyze the grammar and composition of certain significant sentences from each story, and consider how other designs the author could have chosen would have produced different effects. Our emphasis will be on the grammar and language of the reading so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own natural written voice. By considering linguistic forms closely like this, we can come to appreciate the craft of language, training ourselves to discern assumptions and question implications—all to become more thoughtful about what we read and hear.

New selections this term will be from Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (Dell Publishing, 1982), readily available at Amazon and elsewhere. Tuition for this four-session online short course is $350, paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or by personal check (please email me for the mailing address). Tuition this term will include one optional 45-minute session of private instruction where you may discuss your own writing, or learn more about the points of grammar and style we discussed in the course. Upon your registration, I will reply with a confirmation and the Zoom link for the course.

I hope you can join us as we all await the spring.

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