That title phrase belongs to William Sloane, who in his work The Craft of Writing says that the real reader and real reading produce a delight which brings one “almost to the point of loss of personal identity.” We can see the phenomenon, he says, by watching a child read:

Watch a child’s body when he is reading if you want to see the real reader. He wants to get on with the “story,” to be caught up in it, to become it, to take it into himself. In the process he may find much more, but he does so through that delight that is the highest form of entertainment.

Sloane means that when we give ourselves over to something, as a child does naturally without the objectifying thought-forms the years will inevitably bring, we are doing just that: giving our self away, whereupon we are for a time blessedly less our self, less that everyday personality we relentlessly clutch and defend and assert. Facing a work of art without that personal self (and with a bit more philosophy we could call it a personalized Self), we might just find ourselves more human, seeing into what is essential and common to all of us as human beings, not merely into what is peculiar to us alone.

Curiously, the same observation Sloane makes about the self-forgetting, world-attentive child can be made from the quite different angle of logic. Reasoning is traditionally divided into two forms, deductive and inductive. We reason deductively when we move from the general to the particular (all humans are mortal, so you are mortal too), and we reason inductively when we move in the opposition direction, from the particular to the general (my dog barks, and every dog I know barks, so probably all dogs bark). The writer and teacher D. Q. McInerny, in his Introduction to Foundational Logic, says this about that child who caught Sloane’s attention:

In the early stages of a child’s development, all appearances indicate that inductive reasoning is the dominant mode of thought…. Inductive reasoning is more rudimentary, more earthy, than deductive reasoning, in the sense that it is the mode of reasoning we commonly employ in our direct encounters with the physical world, the world we first come to know through sense experience.

If as writers we can perceive and present the objects of sense experience as directly as a child instinctively reads them, we are making it possible for others to see past their own personal experience to the general ideas common to all human selves. The images we compose can become symbols of significant meaning. This is what art in any form, traditionally understood, is meant to accomplish, and by conducting us to such simple and constitutive ideas as hope and despair and pain and love, we are given a way to step out beyond our persisting self-reference, a way to exceed ourselves, and to come to understand what is universal, not singular, in the person we perceive ourselves to be. With the elements and techniques of an art, we advance from the closed particular to the open general.

Sloane says  that “experiencing a work of fiction through one of its characters is the all-absorbing, self-obliterating joy of reading. It is the core of the child’s experience.” And McInerny says that all those direct encounters a child gathers will later “become the material for forming generalizations about the world.” And so every form of art, including the art of writing, begins as an art of perception, becomes an art of thinking, and can advance even further to an art of contemplation, where at the earthy edge of our own self we might unearth the roots of the universally human. And then from there, where?

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Which of these two versions of the same statement do you prefer: I like fresh vegetables and the risk of a frost had passed and I planted a garden, or I like fresh vegetables, so when the risk of a frost had passed, I planted a garden. The first sentence takes three thoughts and presents them as if they were three soldiers standing in a row, shoulder to shoulder, each with an individual duty to perform. The second sentence, however, regards the same three thoughts as seeds, sowing them together so that one arises organically alongside the next. The soldiers have beaten their swords into ploughshares to furrow reason. The latter version, therefore, is the better choice.

Thoughts, in other words, must cooperate with one another in articulating the theme of a sentence. A theme is the overarching subject of a statement, the point the writer wanted to make, which the reader comes to see after putting all the clauses together. We might say, for example, that the theme of our sentence under examination here is planting a garden for fresh vegetables, or enjoying fresh vegetables at home. A theme, whether of a sentence or a paragraph or an entire document, is best stated with a gerund (planting, enjoying), and it is likelier to be found in an independent clause of a sentence, because a subordinate clause works to support another assertion, not make an essential one on its own.

How, though, does one clause support another? By the accurate use of conjunctions. The first of our two example sentences falls flat because the three clauses have only been joined by the coordinating conjunction and, the most general, least specialized connective in English. (Conjunctions are one kind of connective in English grammar, and they form two classes: coordinating and subordinating.) All conjunctions join grammatical elements, but when they join clauses, as is the case in our examples, they serve a logical function, because prose sentences are intended to denote and rationally arrange a set of facts belonging to a theme. If a writer chooses to join clauses merely with the conjunction and, then one thought is simply added to the next, without any logical connection being made clear. Some grammars determine that there are fourteen such connections, with and, called an additive conjunction, heading the list as the most common and least specific.

The reason the second of our example sentences is the better one is now easy to understand: the two instances of the conjunction and in the original version have been replaced by the more logically specific conjunctions so and when. The word so (called an illative conjunction) introduces a consequence or result, and when (called a temporal conjunction) stipulates time or occasion. Our revision of the original sentence is richer, brighter, clearer for exactly the reason that it directs the reader’s thinking through a matrix of assertions. Every clause makes an assertion by joining a subject with a verb (a predicate). That combination produces a thought (an assertion), and when the logically accurate conjunction is placed to introduce a thought, it inevitably connects one assertion with the next, erecting a cognitive edifice for the reader to enter and comprehend the sentential theme.

But there remains the rhetorical fashioning of these grammatical elements. We should notice that in the revised version, the two conjunctions so and when appear next to each other. The consequence which so is introducing is in fact the postponed clause I planted a garden. The connection between those two parts of that one assertion has been interrupted by the temporal clause when the risk of a frost had passed, with no comma between so and when to mark the sudden interposition. In strict punctuation, the sentence would read I like fresh vegetables, so, when the risk of a frost had passed, I planted a garden, but given the theme and the relaxed context we can justifiably assume, this degree of precision would be interruptive.

But there are other possibilities by which to distribute the thoughts of the theme. Keeping the same order of clauses, we could replace the comma with a semicolon in order to elide the conjunction so: I like fresh vegetables; when the risk of a frost had passed, I planted a garden. If that hides the logic too well, we could reorder the concluding clauses: I like fresh vegetables; I planted a garden when the risk of a frost had passed. Or we could modify the opening clause with an adverb, strengthening the idea of result in the following clause: I like fresh vegetables so much that when the risk of a frost had passed, I planted a garden. Or we could begin with the definitive reason for it all, follow that with the result, and push the moment to the close: Because I like fresh vegetables, I planted a garden when the risk of a frost had passed.

Whichever way we choose (and much will depend, as always, on the audience and purpose), we are writing beyond the simple coupling of clauses with the logically ambiguous and. The opposite of ambiguity is precision, which is given the seat of honor on every occasion of good writing.

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In a number of earlier posts (It’s Time to Start Writing; Another Short Revision; First This, Then That), we have looked at the essential difference between the frame of mind we assume in undertaking an initial draft and the very different mind we put on to revise that first attempt.

The British novelist E. M. Forster, in a 1951 collection of essays entitled Two Cheers for Democracy, likewise says that “there is a basic difference between the critical and creative states of mind.” In the creative state, an artist, he says, “lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.” In the critical state, however, which is complementary to, not competitive with, the creative state, the artist

employs some of the highest and subtlest faculties of man. But it is grotesquely remote from the state responsible for the works it affects to expound. It does not let down buckets into the subconscious…. While not excluding imagination and sympathy, it keeps them and all the faculties under control, and only employs them when they promise to be helpful.

“Grotesquely” here means extremely, not disparate. The creative and critical frames of mind are not different in kind, but they are yet poles apart. The critical habit of mind controls the effusive rise of creation. Control means attending to the principles and rules of an art, and in the art of language those are the syntactical principles and grammatical designs within which we shape our language to communicate thoughts and emotions to others. “Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think creation’s,” says Forster.

And this same distinction between the creative and critical habits in art applies more largely to the work of education as well. In a venerable and articulate study entitled Liberal Education, the American poet and author Mark Van Doren says, in effect, that our creativity in defining the curriculum has not been tempered enough by a critical examination of aims and purpose. We are trying to do too much:

It becomes truly important when its limits are seen. What cannot be done will not be attempted at the cost of discrediting the whole enterprise; but what can be done—and the doing of this makes all the difference—will be done as artists do things, with skill and thorough care, and with a reverence not hostile to high spirits.

And he concludes: “If a right relation is maintained between detail and principle, the detail will not be forgotten.” Van Doren’s right relation is Forster’s critical and creative states of mind. Being attentive to this distinction will help us press on past the yawning stretches of a blank screen or piece of paper when we just can’t seem to advance our thoughts. Examine with a critical glance what our creative moment has poured onto the paper. Analyze its structure, ask it questions, better it, add to it, subtract from it—but above all don’t quit. The ancient mythographers knew that standing still with a defeated sigh was the only trap the hero had in truth to walk around.

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Everywhere and always, decade by decade, the debate about the rules of grammar flares up. Some say there never was a permanent set of rules which everyone agreed upon, others say the rules are there but no one knows them, and still others say, rules or not, no one should tell them how to write or speak: there’s enough hegemonic elitism already  going around as it is. The problem is prickly, because wherever you might pick it up, you will feel the sting from both sides. We inevitably identify ourselves with the way we use our language.

Yet for all its subjectivity, the art of language still has its objective side. If it didn’t, words would have no stable meaning for any length of time through any context, and without persistent definitions, we couldn’t assemble a thought someone else could recognize. So somewhere between the extremes of license and prohibition there must lie a workable margin wherein you can tell me something and I can understand what you wish to say without having to puzzle it out. You are using words I understand and you assemble them in a way which the basic structure of the language we share requires at this particular historical juncture. The traditional idea was and is that the rules of grammar—the rules of any art—make for order, which is the precondition that lowers the probability of confusion and raises the probability of precision.

In this debate, therefore, we will be better served if we understand the arts—the art of language, of music, of painting, for example—to be skills which build artifacts to show forth one’s interior thought or vision, to carry out into the world what’s going on in the mind. Watching ideas play in our head and heart, we can’t say anything until we see what they’re doing. Creativity begins with this attentive but solitary, silent attending. But—when we begin to see those interior winds shape themselves into something recognizable, then we can start reaching for our tools to build a common structure for others to see what we see. When well made, those artifacts we assemble will have a recognizable outer form, so that someone else does not have to work quite so hard to understand the thoughts and emotions we have come upon. And if we believe that what we have seen is more than an idiosyncrasy, then we will naturally want to remove every obstacle which might stand in the way of being understood by someone else.

But besides being readily and precisely understood, there’s another reason to stay within a workable margin of accepted definition and usage when we write and speak, and that is how we mean what we say. Grammar and usage, that is to say, intrinsically involve rhetoric. My linguistic choices, for example, will reflect my achievements, grand or humble, in the art of language, just as the manner in which I play the piano, perhaps mistakenly striking two keys at once or saturating a melody with the pedal, will show my nonachievement in the art of music. What one can’t do, of course, is conclude that I am any less a person for being a lesser writer or musician. What one can do, however, is evaluate my artistry against the ideals of the art I am professing. Such objective standards are blessedly impersonal.

But art still is a joyous thing. It is play, it is a game. And is there any game without rules? Rules are not arbitrary regulations; they are ideals which of course, like all ideals, cannot be achieved and sustained in every attempt. And what play, what give there can be in approximating them is exactly what yields that margin between the martinet’s proscriptions and the freethinker’s iconoclasm. Circumstance and purpose will determine how close we need to stay to the center of that boundary channel. Discerning what register my language should be in—what degree of exactitude and what choice of words—is a regular part of the work of the art. And just as a musician will play more than one instrument, so the writer will hope to move freely among such levels of language according to place and purpose, not always observing every rule, but knowing what they are and when to look the other way and why. Arbitrariness is not art.

But none of this has to do with the moral worth of a writer or a musician or a painter as a person, as a human being. One might be a good writer and a lout, one might be a bad writer and a lout. But whether good writer or bad, lout or paragon, respect is due without considerations of background or education or social standing. So if you hear someone say, “Him and me used to work together,” make no judgment about that person’s character. But do know for the sake of the art of language that it should have been he and I.

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Why do we read and why do we read literature? The British scholar Gilbert Murray, an unimpeachable authority in classical studies during the first half of the twentieth century, thought that readers could be divided into two sorts: some read for amusement, for appreciating the craft of writing, for gathering the ideas to carry on a good conversation. All of those make up one group. The other, however, was looking for something quite different. This group, in which Murray placed himself,

does not really much like the process of reading, but reads because it wants to get somewhere, to discover something, to find a light which will somehow illumine for them either some question of the moment or the great riddles of existence. I believe this is the spirit in which most people in their youth read books….

Given the breadth and depth of Murray’s work, it is remarkable to hear him include himself among those who don’t really enjoy reading, but if one is reading to find illumination of some sort, then one is working, not relaxing. This kind of close, reflective reading requires one to catch up with and follow an author traveling into a world of images and ideas which will often prove at first unfamiliar, and almost always unknown in reach and implication. The value of such literature, Murray says, “is not in conveying a new piece of information; their value lies in their power of suddenly directing your attention, and the whole focus of your will and imagination, toward a particular part of life.” And we forget sometimes how much energy paying attention really requires.

These reflections of Murray’s on reading are from his essay “Literature as Revelation,” which can be found in his Humanist Essays (1964). Another work to read in conjunction with this is Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948), where this German philosopher reminds us that the classical Greek word for leisure was schole, the origin of our word school. Interestingly, the Latin word for leisure is otium, and when we say no to leisure, when we negate it, we find ourselves in negotium, negotiating and doing business, which itself derives from busy-ness. To read and think deeply about matters of the highest human importance, then, requires leisure. The implications are profound.

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