There is a fine old classic work on punctuation entitled Mind the Stop by G. V. Carey, published in Britain in 1939. A stop is a Briticism for any of the marks of punctuation (comma, semicolon, colon, and period) which intend to pause the reader to some degree at some specific point in a sentence. Although Carey’s work is almost one hundred years old and some conventions have changed, consulting the classics can be helpful for the clear-minded perspective they take on questions still current—a perspective often more thorough and articulate than we regularly come upon in current explanations.

Carey is straightforward about the purpose of learning to punctuate. He affirms that “the main function of punctuation is to make perfectly clear the construction of the written words.” The italics are his, and they mean to emphasize the idea, which he had addressed earlier, that most of the marks which we position in a sentence are there to direct the eye, not the ear. This is not to ignore the place (and some argue the preeminent place) of hearing in comprehending meaning, but as Carey estimates, “of all that is written and printed only a small fraction is read aloud,” and observes that “the needs of the eye are not exactly the same as those of the voice.” Structure appeals to the eye, cadence to the ear.

All this is another way of saying that we can look at punctuating a sentence from two directions, one logical and the other rhetorical. Consider this simple sentence: The Columbian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, was born in 1927. Many, many writers and readers both will consider the commas here correct, and they will do so by perceiving an ever so slight pause before and after the name of the writer. Somewhere, out of the mists of time and chaos, there was decreed the fiat (I remember hearing it myself in school) that one places a comma where one breathes. The problem with that proclamation, however, is that it is only half true. The language we read is arranged to represent for the eye the meaning which was originally perceived by the ear, whether the physical vibrations caught for the brain by our bodily ear, or the inner vibrations discerned by the mind as we become conscious of meaning. The ear’s discernment is closer to insight than logic, and the converse is true for the eye. We need to breathe and we need to indicate that sometimes with a comma, but if we take a breath in the middle of a group of words which work together logically, then the old decree is not serving the commonweal.

The pair of commas in our example sentence, then, lets our ear favor its wishes at the expense of clear thinking. Commas cut, and they especially cut away from the structure of the sentence information which is deemed merely additional but not essential. But when we excise the writer’s proper name with commas, notice what results: the Columbian writer was born in 1927. This not only puts the reader into the position of wondering which Columbian writer we are talking about, but it also logically implies that there was ever only one Columbian writer, and the reader would of course know the person meant. In other words, the commas have removed essential information: the name of the particular Columbian writer we are referring to who was born in 1927.

That illustrates what is called logical punctuation, but what about the rhetorical, a comma, for example, which is placed (or omitted) for reasons of personal taste (including the rhythm of breathing) in circumstances where no ambiguity, no crashing into critical thought could result? In a recent post, I wrote the following long sentence. The context is not important for our present purposes (you may read the complete post here), but note the comma I placed immediately before the verb helps:

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 ultimate subject of that verb helps is fact, and that noun is defined by the lengthy clause (beginning with the subordinating conjunction that) which follows it. This means, then, that the twenty words before the verb helps comprise the subject phrase for that verb. Now that’s a long way to travel in a sentence before meeting a verb, and so my own unconscious proclivity was to place a comma after the subject phrase so that my readers could catch their breath before taking a few more steps up and into the predicate, where they may finally find rest. I did not (and do not) believe I impaired the logic, but a good many editors will make it clear to me that the rules dictate no comma should stand between a subject and its predicate. Alas.

This tension between steel rules and pliable exceptions is a part of any creative work, work of any artistic sort which intends its spectators to see meaning amidst the objects and events of life. No such effort runs continuously without its difficulties, and if we can remember that, we will be able to work—to write—with less frustration, disappointment, and near despair. Says Carey in summary:

Stops should be used as sparingly as sense will permit; but in so far as they are needed for immediate grasp of the sense or for the avoidance of any possible ambiguity, or occasionally to relieve a very lengthy passage, they should be used as freely as need be.

To relieve a very lengthy passage. Indeed.

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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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A convincing case could be made, I think, that if ever there were a moment when looking back at the origin of an idea could give us a needed perspective, now might be such a time. We seem to have lost the plot in much of the schooling we confer on our young people. Good plots are organized to an end, but can we really say the same for the multitudinous, uncoordinated courses of study we offer our students and call an education? Not the curriculum, I mean, of specific subjects—chemistry, mathematics, engineering—but the basics which arise from certain presuppositions we hold about what an education—the training of the mind—is ultimately for. We should not be surprised if we slip and slide when we cannot say why we should try to cultivate our intellect.

Western education in its traditional form is, or was, organized around what is termed the seven liberal arts. The phrase likely rings hopelessly antiquated, even quaint, to most of us these days, but until we understand what they were originally after, we place ourselves outside the reach of the real help they can yet offer. In a textbook on writing from more than half a century ago, Robert Hughes and P. Albert Duhamel, in their Rhetoric: Principles and Usage, 1962, describe the traditional liberal arts curriculum this way:

Considered necessary parts of the training of the truly educated man until the Renaissance, these seven arts were divided into two parts: the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Quadrivium, which was the course of study leading to the Master of Arts degree, consisted of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. The Trivium, which was the course of study leading to the Bachelor of Arts degree, dealt with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The Quadrivium consisted of subject-matter arts, studied for the information which they convey about their respective subjects…. The Trivium dealt with disciplinary arts, studied because they train the mind to understand, communicate and reason correctly.

The Trivium, then, was the preprofessional course of study, as I have heard it modernly described. Though we can take the point in that description, it was more than what we today call a core curriculum. It had—and has—to do with inculcating and training the abilities which have specially to do with being human: using language to represent and symbolize one’s awareness, conceptualizing those perceptions and relating them rationally, and acknowledging their emotive value and strength and appeal. More than a core, the three studies of the trivium—grammar and logic and rhetoric—comprise the nucleus of all subsequent and particularized learning. Hughes and Duhamel continue:

The arts of the Trivium are not concerned with a limited subject matter area, but can be applied to all subject matters. Logic is not the art of correct reasoning in physics or philosophy, but the art of reasoning rightly on any subject. The art of rhetoric teaches how to write effectively—not merely on political or social problems—but on any problem about which people can deliberate.

But the purpose of these three nuclear studies was originally after something even more than rational deliberation and clear conceptualization. The Swiss scholar and art historian Titus Burckhardt, in his Mirror of the Intellect, 1987, speaks of the “contemplative structure” of this curriculum: “They were,” he says, “the expression of so many faculties of the soul, faculties demanding harmonious development. This is why they were also called arts.” And this mention of the soul and our education of it (what Plato called our tendance, or watchful care, over it, which he believed was the highest business of life) points to the first purposes of both parts of the liberal arts curriculum. If the Trivium was, as Burckhardt puts it, “a schooling in both language and thought,” the Quadrivium too looked beyond the obvious to its metaphysical sources: the end of arithmetic is not merely calculating, but contemplating how it is that number arises from unity; geometry is number seen in linear configurations, not merely the manipulation of numerals; music has to do with harmony, and astronomy with the coordinated rhythm of the visible skies—all to the inciting of wonder, the very origin of philosophy and perhaps even the counsel needed in a time of confusion. Says Burckhardt:

Number, proportion, harmony, and rhythm are clear manifestations of unity in diversity, and clear indications of the way of return from diversity to unity. According to Boethius [the fifth century Roman philosopher] the essence of things is intimately connected with unity: the more unity a thing possesses in itself, the more profoundly it participates in being.

It might just be that we need now such a return in the direction of unity, of what is common to us not just as citizens of a particular nation, but as human beings of one shared nature. It has been said that what binds us most essentially to one another in the modern world is economics, but that would be too narrow and sorry a hope for the original vision of the liberal arts. The liberality, or freedom, which they are set up to inculcate is to be had whether rich or comfortable or poor—a state of mind found, if ever, only after a disciplined inner search under the guidance of language in the direction of higher things. These serious arts can help us address our now most pressing need: to be once again serious persons.

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Precision, concision—confusion. Being precise and concise are hallmarks of good writing, but too much of any good thing turns into its opposite. I saw recently a community board posting on social media similar to this one, and it offers a review exercise for us to figure out just what went wrong. Here is my facsimile of the original post: Looking for help. It’s my friend’s birthday next week and there’s too much to do. He is a big hunter and wanted to have animal cookies made. So did the writer want to have animal cookies made, or did the hunter friend want his party to include a whimsical treat?

What’s going on grammatically here at the point of confusion is called a compound predicate, and if such arrangements are not constructed and punctuated correctly, confusion will result. We remember that every thought we wish to communicate in expository prose is composed of a subject and a predicate. The subject is the notion we wish to say something about, and the predicate, which is where the finite verb will appear, states what we want to say about the subject. The whole project of rationality is a function of naming and asserting, naming and asserting, over and over again as we build up sentences into a paragraph. Each time we combine a subject with a predicate we produce a clause. Sentences, then, are composed of one or more clauses.

From a logical point of view, strictly speaking (and very strictly so), we can only say one thing at a time about one notion, which means we should only have one idea (called a substantive) in the subject and one verb in the predicate. Such bare statements are called in logic categorical propositions, and they are useful as laboratorial ways to isolate the exact idea someone is predicating something of. Were we to limit our natural language to such an extreme analytical way of expression, however, our readers and interlocutors would soon swoon and fall from the unrelieved tedium of it all. There is, thankfully, a sharp difference between a writer’s sentence and a logician’s proposition. The latter is a steely analytical tool absent of rhetoric; the former is a representation of our thoughts in language both logical and rhetorical.

The grammar and composition of natural language tell the laboratorians to get on with it, giving us all the okay to compound both the subjects and predicates of our sentences in a display of diversity, should the set of ideas under discussion be manageable enough to avoid misunderstanding. To say that I will have a birthday party for my friend is to make a single assertion with a simple subject and simple predicate, simple meaning only one notion in the subject and only one finite verb form in the predicate: I a personal pronoun naming the substantive, and will have, the future tense of the verb to have making an assertion.

Let’s take this theory now and apply it to the example under consideration. When the writer of the post says that He is a big hunter and wanted to have animal cookies made, the subject is simple because only one notion is named (he), but the predicate includes two finite verbs, is and wanted, creating the  compound predicate (the phrase to have is a infinitive form of a verb; infinitives do not form part of the mechanics of a clause). On the face of it, this construction intends to assert that the subject he should stand as the subject for both the two verbs: he is a big hunter and he wanted to have animal cookies made. We are justified in coming to this conclusion (the unexpected possibility notwithstanding) because there is no comma separating the two verbs of the compound predicate.

In all likelihood, however, the writer’s intention was different. He or she had begun the post with the plea looking for help, and the sentence immediately before the one we’re analyzing suggested that time was running out, there being too much to do. That circumstantial evidence is sufficient for us to reason that it was the writer, not the hunter friend, who wanted the animal cookies made for the party; that, however, is not what the sentence says. So what to do?

The fix could not be simpler: add the pronoun I before the verb wanted: He is a big hunter and I wanted to have animal cookies made. That’s the obvious correction, so what more can we learn from this slip? First, that compound predicates are condensed statements of otherwise discrete, simple assertions: is and wanted mean he is and I wanted, two distinct predications which logical thought will require to be differentiated; second, that compound predicates are a fine and common way of creating sentences as long as ambiguity does not result; third, that a compound predicate usually does not separate its verbs with a comma when the subject is simple (he is a hunter and travels to the north woods); and fourth, in such sentences, however, we may nonetheless place a comma between the two verbs if one of them (usually the latter) is long and involved (he is a hunter, and travels to the north woods every fall to meet up with friends at a camp on the border). Such punctuation is called a rhetorical comma: it works to separate semantic groups, not for logical accuracy but for readier comprehension.

One final point. Some readers will notice that I did not include a comma between the two independent clauses of the revised version (He is a big hunter and I wanted to have animal cookies made). The standard rule is to insert a comma between independent clauses when the subjects are different (as here), but one is at liberty to omit it, as the Chicago Manual of Style puts it, “if the clauses are very short and closely connected.” As frustrating as it can be at times to know what to do, especially in matters of punctuation, an acquaintance with the rules and knowing when to suspend them lie at the heart of art, and this surety requires that sixth sense which only comes with reading and more reading, writing and more writing.

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Just what is our imagination? We can’t get very far in any thinking about the arts, including the art of writing, before we find ourselves using the word to refer to some kind of thing we sense is going on in our heads to produce a work others can see or hear or read. But notice where I just placed this thing we call the imagination: in our heads. That is a very modern and precarious idea, because most of the world would have most of the time in the past referred to the imagination as a power not in the head, but in the heart. Much depends on our definition of what is human. Traditionally, the head thinks and the heart feels.

Our modern dictionaries say that our imagination is “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality” (Merriam-Webster); or the act “of creating new images or ideas by combining previous experiences” (Webster’s New World); or simply “the creative faculty of the mind” (Concise Oxford). Once again the mind. But to imagine, according to the ancients, is to give rise to, to allow to be, not to make to be: to create, not to contrive. It requires a passive and receptive disposition from the working artist, and it seems to turn away when too many questions are asked. And that is an immensely consequential idea to be clear about, because it means our artistic work is a becoming aware of goings-on elsewhere, which we learn to watch and watch over in order to understand and then represent with reason in some significant form.

It is probably correct to say that we popularly associate the word imagination first with the poets, but of course this power lies in some degree behind all creative work. Still, many poets, the imposing John Keats among them, struggled to understand the sometimes unmanageable force which compelled them to attend to a new arising of images demanding form. The American scholar and critic Clarence Thorpe, in his The Mind of John Keats (1926), says this about the English poet’s ideas across the span of an intense but brief life:

In both his letters and his poems Keats has, first to last, many things to say about the imagination. Always he understood it to be the supreme active principle in poetic composition. But how decisively with the rapid maturity of his intellect and critical judgment during the brief, fitful working period of his life did his ideas change and develop…. Imagination, with its springs in the heart rather than the head, though the head too has its place, becomes with Keats the highest and most authentic guide to truth.

That third sentence of Thorpe’s is itself a lesson in the art of writing (an inverted structure in which all of the predicate elements, normally following the verbs, precede them for emphatic isolation), but more to the point here is his reference to the heart, which Keats, along with received tradition, identified as the source and place of the imagination. Thorpe continues:

Not only is the imagination to be trusted more implicitly than reason in matters where both are operative, but there are even things clear to the imagination of which the reason knows nothing.

Again the ancient position. Striking and maintaining this balance between imagination and reason, heart and head, is the very work of artistic composition. Too much imagination will produce only fantasies about what we cannot see, but too much reason will tie us tight to only what we can. The third-century Greek philosopher Plotinus (quoted in E. F. Carritt’s Philosophies of Beauty, 1931) warns of this:

Deliberate reasoning occurs in our mortal life when the soul is uncertain and troubled and not at its best. For the need of reasoning is a defect or inadequacy of apprehension. So in the arts; when artists falter, reasoning takes the reins; but when there is no hitch their imagination governs them and achieves the work.

Plotinus’s “inadequacy of apprehension” is the English philosopher Owen Barfield’s “mere perception,” when he remarks in his The Rediscovery of Meaning (1977) that “mere perception—perception without imagination—is the sword thrust between spirit and matter.” He goes on to say that this split, or gap, is particularly Western in its vehemence, but that it is imagination which can traverse it:

Now imagination does not disregard the gap; it depends on it. It lives in it as our very self-consciousness does, in this case not as a small helpless creature caught in a trap between the two, but rather as a rainbow spanning the two precipices and linking them harmoniously together. The concern of imagination is neither with mere matter nor with pure spirit.

But are we now any the closer to understanding just what the imagination is? Perhaps not strictly so, but with Barfield’s image of a rainbow spanning the two precipices of matter and spirit, the visible and invisible, we are in the effective presence of imagination itself. And if we take Plotinus’s instruction that we not think but contemplate that image, we might get far into just what imagination is. Perhaps even so far as to feel it at hand.

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