À la recherche du temps perdu.
A certain class of American (you'll never guess which one) likes to bash other Americans for being monolingual. ‘In Switzerland they know five language by graduation and we can’t learn Spanish in High School.’ If these Americans were a tad less parochial, they might wonder where else it’s common to be monolingual. It's not South America. It's not East Asia. It's not Europe and nor is it Africa. It’s Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.
I’m assuming the common denominator is obvious.
When you’re growing up in Spain, it’s very easy to know what language to learn. You’re going to learn English. When you’re growing up in Japan, it’s very easy to know what language to learn. You’re going to learn English. When you're growing up in Egypt – okay, you get the point. Not only would you know which language to learn, you'd never lack for resources. There's English language music, English language movies, English language sports, gossip, politics, even cooking shows absolutely everywhere. Also, everyone you know is learning (or has learnt) English.
If, however, you already speak English, what language do you learn? Well, that’s a mite more difficult to answer. Turns out, for most English-speakers across the world, the answer is ‘no other language.’
I’ve written about this before, but there is a disconnect for (so-called, self-styled) intellectuals of our generation between the necessity to read widely and the necessity to reflect at leisure. Part of the problem is we mediate our world through screens; with free access to the works of the world, we freeze our access to our own works. Why learn to play the piano when Glenn Gould is one click away? Why learn to sew when you can get a customized blanket sent from India by Friday? Why learn a language when you’re already native in the world’s language?
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The Courtyard
But part of the problem is that we simply do not teach our children what they would need to know to have later leisure. It’s not exactly that if one doesn’t learn it by twenty, he’s doomed for life. It’s merely that from ten to twenty we have a captured creature who is not expected to do anything with his life but learn. So teach him!
I remember a creative writing class in college. I remember it not for anything we read in the class (I cannot, in fact, remember anything we read in class), but for two things my professor said to me.
We were assigned to write a sonnet. While most wrote about love, sex, abuse, or angst, I wrote a satire about how we could not convert by the sword (a forced conversion is no conversion at all). When I presented it, the professor asked me to re-read it, presumably to assure herself the poem was satiric. Then she said, ‘No one cares about those questions anymore. You write like you were to the 18th century’.
Another time we were to write blank verse or free verse. Given that free verse isn’t poetry (don’t @ me), I decided to write blank verse. Most of the others wrote love poems, and I too wrote a love poem – of sorts. I wrote to my granddad. My professor said, ‘No one is that open with their (sic) feelings anymore’.
The point isn’t that I’m weird. (You know that if you’re receiving this newsletter. You probably signed up for this newsletter because of it.) The point is actually that my poems and (even moreso) my stories were sophomoric. Worse than sophomoric, they were juvenile. Worse than juvenile, they were the work of a semi-literate adolescent. Which was what I was – even at twenty. Yet my works were also some of the best on offer in that class, and this at a fairly reputable university.
Did any of us read poems daily? Had any of us memorized a store of them? It’s not as if either would have been unusual for a man (even with only a year or two of schooling) just 100-years ago. We had had a decade of education and knew no poetry by heart. We’d learnt about the sodium-potassium pump instead.
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With Our Fathers
My elder daughter, who’s just more than two-and-a-half now, does the laundry. She doesn’t always do it, and she can't quite do all of it. But, if I’m there to do what she can’t, she unloads the washer, moves that hamper to the side, loads up the washer, turns the dial, and presses the two buttons that need pressing (with some help, because she doesn't understand what 'press and hold' means). She then unloads the dryer, sets that hamper aside, moves the hamper with the wets before the dryer, loads the dryer, and (after I pick her up so she can stand on the dryer) sets the dials properly before pushing it to start.
I can now do laundry even with the baby in my arms, and the two-year-old absolutely loves it. She loves it so much, I’ve used the promise of laundry to break her out of a tantrum.
Children want to be helpful. They want to do what the adults do. As far as I can tell, this explodes the idea that we must teach children ‘how to learn’ (the justification for teaching them about, for example, the functions of a cell). If a child isn’t learning a skill, it’s either because they don’t want to know it (or be known to know it) or because we’ve untaught them an inborn skill.
There’s a joke I like. I might even have used it for you before. It goes, ‘If we took all babies from their mamas and put them in school, it would take only a generation for some expert to say a child couldn’t learn to walk without credentialed experts.’
I often hear this when I’m discussing the education of our forefathers. George Washington didn’t attend school past about ten. Read his letters, his speeches, or his book; he was a man of easy eloquence. William Shakespeare famously had two years of schooling and knew “little Latin and less Greek”. You might have heard of him, though. I believe he’s famous for… oh… what was it now?
Before compulsory schooling, Massachusetts had a literacy rate of about 97% (it’s currently 90%). When I say things like this, people rise in defense of institutional schooling and shout objections. ‘That means they could sign their name’, someone will (has) shouted. Except when you read the letters sent back from the Civil War, that objection melts. Sure – their spelling is all over the place, but their references span from the Bible to contemporary poetry to antique myths, their cadence and syntax are complex, and their metaphors robust.
To this I usually hear, ‘That’s just cherry picked! Most people couldn’t write like that!’ Except if you go revisit the Lincoln-Douglas debates, you will see that the men of that time could at least listen to complexly syntactical hour-long arguments with detailed references to the Bible, Shakespeare, and antique republicans. One of the most well-owned books of the time, The Columbian Orator, contained speeches from all and sundry famous statesmen, including translation of Cicero and Socrates (i.e. Plato). Besides this, most mid-19th Century Americans owned a Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, some Shakespeare, and a smattering of Longfellow, Pilgrims Progress, etc.
Given that those (and newspapers full of literate debates) were what was available to read, is it any surprise they had a greater sensitivity to the weight, balance, and feel of words? Is it any wonder they had a greater breadth of reference and a finer taste for wit?
I like Harry Potter a good deal more than most people, but if that's a generation's idea of 'high literature', that generation is in deep trouble. Like the son of an NBA and a WNBA player fed on small meals of rice, peas, and carrots, the Shakespeares born to us will write like Judith Butler if not given proper meat to feed on.
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Flowerbeds
Instead of displaying a famous and beautiful work of visual art, I’m going to put up a portrait of a poet (or, rather, poetess) and then give you her poem. Her name is Alice Cary, and though her poem is titled ‘November’, I feel I (and perhaps you, dear Scriptor) could use its message now more than ever.
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Portrait of Alice Cary, Unknown Artist
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November
by Alice Cary
The leaves are fading and falling,
The winds are rough and wild,
The birds have ceased their calling,
But let me tell, you my child,
Though day by day, as it closes,
Doth darker and colder grow,
The roots of the bright red roses
Will keep alive in the snow.
And when the Winter is over,
The boughs will get new leaves,
The quail come back to the clover,
And the swallow back to the eaves.
The robin will wear on his bosom
A vest that is bright and new,
And the loveliest way-side blossom
Will shine with the sun and dew.
The leaves to-day are whirling,
The brooks are all dry and dumb,
But let me tell, you my darling,
The Spring will be sure to come.
There must be rough, cold weather,
And winds and rains so wild;
Not all good things together
Come to us here, my child.
So, when some dear joy loses
Its beauteous summer glow,
Think how the roots of the roses
Are kept alive in the snow.
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Hortus Proprius
“Have you ever wondered why you can’t exactly define a rhetorical question? Have you ever wondered why you yet know it when you see it? Have you figured out the gimmick to this introduction yet? Are you now wondering when I’ll stop and get to the point?”
Perhaps because he who asks a rhetorical question never expects an answer, anyone asking about what, exactly, is a rhetorical question has yet to get an answer. Espy gives the popular definition, calling a rhetorical question a question “to which no answer is expected, or to which only one answer can be made.” But if my series of rhetorical questions, above, feels a bit excessive, Forsyth spends a full page (humorously, granted) elaborating on how no one knows exactly what a rhetorical question is. Sr. Miriam Joseph doesn’t even list “Rhetorical Question” in her index, for she breaks up each species in the Greek or Roman style.
As Silva Rhetoricae (maintained by BYU) has it:
“The rhetorical question is usually defined as any question asked for a purpose other than to obtain the information the question asks. For example, "Why are you so stupid?" is likely to be a statement regarding one's opinion of the person addressed rather than a genuine request to know. Similarly, when someone responds to a tragic event by saying, "Why me, God?!" it is more likely to be an accusation or an expression of feeling than a realistic request for information."
The simple definition of Rhetorical Question, therefore, seems to be that there is no simple definition. What follows is a list of a dozen Figures, each a species of Rhetorical Question. I warn you from Go, some of these overlap.
Erotesis, or ‘questioning’, is a Figure where a question is asked in expectation of a negative answer. In Latin, these questions might (would? I don't know Latin well enough) start with ‘num’.
“Now, my liege,
Tell me what blessings I have here alive,
That I should fear to die?”
(Winters Tale 3.2.113)
Hermione here asks her question knowing and implying the answer is “nothing”. But here’s where things become difficult and why precisely categorizing rhetorical questions are actually impossible. For while Hermione’s question is a near perfect example of erotesis, it's also examples of anacoenosis.
Anacoenosis, or the impartener, the common cause, or anachinosis, is a Figure which asks the judgment of the judge or audience, often while implying a common interest with him or them.
“Tell me faire Ladies, if the case [a matter of sexual indiscretion] were your owne, So foule a fault would you haue it be knowen?”
(Puttenham)
“And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?”
(Isaiah 5:3-4)
“This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” (Galatians 3:2)
“BRUTUS: Who is
here so base that would be a bondman? If any,
speak, for him have I offended. Who is here so rude
that would not be a Roman? If any, speak, for him
have I offended. Who is here so vile that will not
love his country? If any, speak, for him have I
offended. I pause for a reply.
PLEBEIAN: None, Brutus, none.
BRUTUS: Then none have I offended. I have done no more to Caesar than you will do to Brutus."
more to Caesar than you shall do to Brutus.
(Julius Caesar 3.2.29)
Not to belabor how confusing this can be, but while this speech from Brutus is a perfect anacoenosis, it is also an anthypophora.
Anthypophora, or subjectio or the Figure of Response, is a Figure which asks a question which is then immediately answered, either by the questioner or the audience.
“‘But there are only three hundred of us,’ you object. Three hundred, yes, but men, but armed, but Spartans, but at Thermoplyae: I have never seen three hundred so numerous.”
(Seneca)
“What need I be so forward with
Him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter.
Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me
off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a
leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a
wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then?
No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word
“honor”? What is that “honor”? Air. A trim reckoning.
Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth
he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible,
then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the
living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore,
I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon. And
so ends my catechism.”
(Henry IV, Part 1 5.1.129)
Falstaff’s “Honour Catechism” here is a paragon of anthypophora. It’s so much anthypophora that it’s dianoea, which is the asking and answering of questions so as to develop an argument. But it’s not just anthypophora and dianoea, it’s also ratiocinatio.
Ratiocinatio, or reasoning, is a Figure which asks questions of oneself in the way that anacoenosis asks questions of the audience. It therefore overlaps with anthyphora if the questioner then answers himself.
“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” (Romeo and Juliet 2.2.36)
By the way, both ratiocinatio and anacoenosis fall under an umbrella called aporia, which is the asking of a question as if deliberating with oneself or another, whether or not someone answers.
Back to the teenager in love: we could niggle, say Juliet here is asking Romeo. After all, she uses the second-person singular. But she doesn’t know he’s standing right below her balcony. In fact, besides asking herself why he is called Romeo and then reasoning through what she will do about it, she also poses the question as a sort of lament. Which means her question is also an epiplexis.
Epiplexis, or increpacio or percontatio, is a Figure which poses a question to chide or inveigh or to express grief.
“Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?”
(Job 3:11)
“Thynkest thou that thy counselles are not
knowen? and that we knowe not what thou dyddest the
laste nyghte? and what the nyghte before?”
(Richard Sherry quoting “Cicero agaynst Catiline”)
“Are these your herd?
Must these have voices, that can yield them now
And straight disclaim their tongues? What are your offices?
You being their mouths, why rule you not their teeth?
Have you not set them on?”
(Coriolanus 3.1.41)
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child?”
(King Lear 1.4.303)
If the grief expressed is an attempt to elicit sympathy, then it’s also an exuscitatio.
Exuscitatio is a Figure which attempts to stir others feelings by a vehement expression of one’s own. This need not be just grief.
“Can I stand by and let the government trample on my rights? Is that safe? Is that right? Can any of us afford to allow this wrong to continue?” (Silva Rhetoricae)
“What man is he, be he never so envious, never so malicious, never so ambitious of priase, but must needs commend this man, and acknowledge him to be most virtuous, most learned, most wise?” (Espy)
“O, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide,
How couldst thou drain the lifeblood of the child
To bid the father wipe his eyes withal,
And yet be seen to bear a woman’s face?
Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible;
Thou, stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless.
Bidd’st thou me rage? Why, now thou hast thy wish.
Wouldst have me weep? Why, now thou hast thy will;
For raging wind blows up incessant showers,
And when the rage allays, the rain begins.
These tears are my sweet Rutland’s obsequies,
And every drop cries vengeance for his death
’Gainst thee, fell Clifford, and thee, false
Frenchwoman!”
(Henry VI, Part 3 1.4.140)
Also and for what it’s worth, exuscitatio isn’t just a rhetorical question but a Figure of Pathos.
And that long lament by York? You guessed it. It isn’t just exuscitatio, but an example of pysma.
Pysma is a Figure of asking several questions in a row, so as to overwhelm the recipient and excite emotion in the audience. The questions also tend to be pointed if not outright sharp to provoke the hearer.
“In what place did he speak with them, with whom did he speak; how did he persuade them; did he hire them; whom did he hire; by whom did he hire them; to what end or how much did he give them?”
(Cicero to Roscius, quoted by Espy)
Our Shakespeare also involves Queen Margaret, this she’s speaking to Queen Elizabeth, Edward IV’s wife. This from Richard III:
“Where is thy husband now? Where be thy brothers?
Where are thy two sons? Wherein dost thou joy?
Who sues and kneels and says “God save the Queen?”
Where be the bending peers that flattered thee?
Where be the thronging troops that followed thee?
Decline all this, and see what now thou art”
(4.4.94)
And finally…
Erotema, or interrogatio, the questioner, a Figure which uses a question to affirm or deny a point strongly. This is perhaps the essence of what we generally mean by rhetorical question.
“Why are you so stupid?”
“O heavens! is’t possible a young maid’s wits
Should be as mortal as an old man’s life?”
(Hamlet 4.5.159)
“Doth God pervert the thing that is lawful, or doth the Almighty pervert justice?… Can a rush be green without moisture, or may the grasse grow without water?”
(Job 8:3 and 8:11)
Each species of rhetorical question has its own use, which I've tried to highlight in their descriptions, but the power of the genus lies in forcing a reader to make his own answer. The solution to whatever question raised comes internally and so feels natural, inevitable, uncompelled. “It will,” in Espy’s words, “impress him more than the speaker’s statement.”
Shall we sum that up in a sentence? In other words, the power of a rhetorical question lies in inviting the hearers to participate in creating a community between the speaker and the audience.
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A Bench Under the Trees
“How to Write English Prose” by David Bentley Hart
I feel some trepidation about recommending this piece. Mr. Hart is a communist, and a communist should be listened to with all the attention and belief one would give a Nazi. That is, they should be ignored or, if annoying, drummed far from decent people. Yet he here gives his opinion not on politics or history but on writing, and he is a good writer. His taste runs toward the baroque, which goes against the spirit of the age. If you are interested, and can suffer his dismissal of several stars of the writerly firmament, Orwell and Faulkner to name two. Read if you can stomach him.
“The Meaning of Memorisation” by Niall Gooch
There is a live debate in education between those who believe one should teach children how to think and those who believe one should teach children facts. While there is always the danger of Gradgrinding away at the children, I am a firm believer in facts. Or, rather, in the memorization of words, poetry, passages, dates, names, music, and art. But Mr. Gooch here reminds us, “The best case for memorisation is not pedagogical. Rather, it is about what it means to be fully human, and how we can make ourselves members of a continuing civilisation rather than a load of individual units who happen to briefly be in the same place at the same time.”
The whole article is heartwarming and worthwhile.
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The Ampitheter
As I said in an earlier newsletter, I wasted too much of my life in video games. While the detriments I suffered from them were to the benefits like The Andes to some ant hills, there were some benefits. One was my introduction to a variety of (often absolutely spectacular) music. Here is one such.
You might know it. Even if you’ve never played video games, you might know it. It was the first (and I think the only?) video game song to win a grammy. Composed for the 2005 game Civilization IV (perhaps the game I’ve spent the most time playing, if it’s not EUIV), it’s called “Baba Yetu”.
“Baba Yetu” means “Our Father” in Swahili. The lyrics come from the Swahili translation of the Lord’s Prayer (‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…’). The score itself is a sweeping modern hymn with deeply classical origins, composed by Christopher Tin.
The whole piece is an exercise in multiculturalism at its best. We have a Middle Eastern prayer, translated into an African language, put to music originating in Europe, by an American composer whose parents came from Asia. And (this is the actually important bit) the song can still bring tears to my eyes eighteen years after I first heard it.
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Reviso Patribus et Peroratio
I recognize some readers may read me write ‘teach the child’ and then in the next section ‘children don’t need to learn how to learn’ and feel some confusion. The art of teaching is the art of presenting good ideas expressed well to students in the order and just at a time when the ideas or their presentation tax but do not exceed the student’s capacity. It’s the weight-lifting approach to education; you want to feel the burn but not break the back.
It isn’t that there is anything wrong with teaching a child advanced algebra. It’s merely that the child will never need to know it, and, if he does, then he can learn it as an adult. Education should be for the useful arts, what the child will use day in and day out.
‘But Judd,’ I hear, ‘You’re suggesting they memorize poetry. That’s not exactly useful.’
But it is! There is nothing more useful than to learn (that is, to know intimately) the best from our tradition of what has been thought and spoken on family, life, politics, religion, and art. It is actually useful to know how to read a sentence, analyze an argument, make a speech, keep the family budget, play an instrument, build a shed, or read a map.
Said in a rhetorical question: how useful would it be for our politics if all our citizens walked around with bits of speeches from two-dozen former American statesmen in their heads?
If our children can’t even learn that, then all they’re going to do when they come home from work (perhaps at a job for which they will have had to learn that advanced algebra) is put on the piece of Glenn Gould (if they even like classical) and order a customizable blanket on their app (if they know enough about design to care for something more refined than what we might buy from Walmart). They will have none of the creation that, at least judging by my small girls, so infuses the life of every child and of all premodern men.
The immediate purpose of this newsletter is to present the Figures of Speech, as a study for me, a tool for you, and a prelude to a future book for all. But its further purpose is to recover the the Liberal Arts generally, the Trivium specifically, and how to teach them all. We talk about civilizational struggle, but what we’re in is a civilizational catastrophe, a civilizational collapse.
It’s been generations in the coming, and we’re the generation its landed on. Our hope is the hope of the early Church. We must hunker down, not separate from the world but stand apart from it. We must take our inheritance and preserve it, so one day, when our epoch’s Carolingian Renaissance comes, we still have the material of our last Golden Age. This too will be generations in the making.
As Hannah Arendt said, “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians - we call them 'children'.”
Let us teach them.
As always, please share this newsletter with anyone who you think might like it. If you’ve come here without being a Scriptor, sign up HERE. If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE. And if you’d like to share your thoughts with me, please do so. You can reach me below: on Twitter, through my website, or by email. You’d also be doing me a favor if you shared this edition of Hortus Scriptorius on any social media available to you.
Until next we meet, I remain your fellow
Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff
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