Nam etsi ambulavero in medio umbrae mortis, non timebo mala.
I thought I might watch my daughter die this past Monday.
I’ve half-written another newsletter but that will wait a fortnight. This takes precedence a mite. Sunday night, our two-year-old spiked a fever. She wouldn’t take her fever suppressants, and so we had the choice of wrestling her and forcing them down her throat or of waiting until the morning when we could get chewable Tylenol. We chose to wait until the morning.
Let me rephase that: I chose to wait until the morning. My wife didn’t fight me on it, but she was in favor of force. I chose patience, and my patience let my daughter's fever give her a seizure.
Monday morning, we put our daughter in front of her favorite movie while I did some quick chores downstairs. My mother came, took one look at her, said she would go get the chewables (we were having them delivered and they wouldn’t arrive for another hour). Not long after my mom left, my wife went upstairs. I was in the middle of prep for dinner when she screamed.
I will never forget that scream, nor will I forget how my daughter looked. Her lips turned blue before the seizure stopped.
When I explained what happened – to the paramedic, the doctors, the nurses, my mother, and my wife – everyone said the same thing: ‘You couldn’t have known’, ‘That was a reasonable decision’, ‘That’s what you should have done’, or anything at all to excuse me of fault.
Why do we feel the need to justify each others’ failures?
It’s all nonsense anyway. I knew that a high fever left untreated could cause a seizure in young children. I didn’t just know it, I thought about it. I knew her fever had for some time been over the 102 thermometer reading it should stay below. And yet I made the decision. However reasonable we can argue it into being, I made the decision.
It wasn’t my fault, exactly, but it was my responsibility. I made the choice. And I will never be the same.
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The Courtyard
I once tutored a teenager. He was a good kid, but universally neglected by… well universally. His father hired me as tutor after he’d been suspended for selling his prescription drugs at school. Being proactive, his father had hired me early enough I could attend (and be evidence in) the boy’s disciplinary hearing.
Besides me, his father had marshalled other evidence in the boy’s favor. For example, he was to lose his phone for a month. It was either a month or until the suspension was over. I can’t remember now. And it doesn’t really matter, because two days later, when I showed up for our first tutoring meeting, I met the boy playing on his phone.
‘Didn’t you lose that?’ I asked.
The boy literally stared at me in confusion. Then he understood, and he laughed.
‘Oh no. We just said that to make them take it easy on me.’
Responsibility. There are ways to teach it.
I worked with him a lot that year, maybe a thousand dollars his father spent on me (and I wasn’t making much an hour). I failed him a lot, and I learnt how much his school had failed him. (He didn’t, for example, understand what variables in math were, and couldn't imagine what relation 1X and 3X could have to each other.) But one of the things I remember best happened at the very end of my time with him.
As part of his punishment, he took occasional drug tests (I took him to several). One test, not long before graduation, we knew he would fail. He’d smoked some weed several days before the scheduled test.
Instead of letting him fail, his father bought a strange syrupy drink from a guy he knew (a guy at work?) which supposedly leached the pot out of your bloodstream. I’m not sure either of them thought it would work, though they both professed rock-ribbed faith in the foul mixture. Anyway – he failed, because of course he failed.
In what would prove to be our last tutoring session, he and I were talking about his failure. He was laughing it off, saying ‘I guess it was dumb’ in that tone of voice one uses to invite refutation. So I looked him dead in the eye.
And I said, “Yes, that was really dumb.”
To say he was shocked would be like saying Notre Dame was pretty, but he laughed it off like a champ. He was, at bottom, a good kid – a good kid universally failed.
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With Our Fathers
My daughter became aware in the ambulance more than halfway to the hospital. She’d been shouting most of the way for me, now calling for “Papa” and now “Dada”, though she hadn’t used “Dada” since she’d first learnt to talk. And though I tried everything from reassurances to songs, nothing, nothing I said she seemed to hear. Then her temperature spiked and the paramedic cooled her down with water he kept in syringes. Then she slept for a breath, and when she awoke she screamed but could hear me when I sang.
Shortly after getting to the hospital, she took a two-hour nap on my shoulder. Only then did I feel safe.
When she woke from that nap, she was an angel. They stuck stuff in her ears, blinded her with light, poured foul medicine down her throat, poked things up her nose, and she hardly said ‘boo’. They even stuck her with a catheter. I had to lie on top of her, hugging her and getting some salt-water into her hair while she screamed and two nurses held her feet while a third got the urine.
When they were done, she stopped crying. She clung over my shoulder, and, as they were leaving, and as my wife and I said ‘Bye, Thank you’ to the nurses, our daughter turned and waved, saying “Bye bye. Thank you.”
We’ve been teaching her that she must be polite even when she doesn’t feel like it, but Boy Howdy what a time for a two-year-old to demonstrate what she’s learnt.
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Flowerbeds
Madonna della Pietà is the full name of a sculpture I until just now thought was called La Pietà. (Remember boys and girls, google – or in my case DuckDuckGo – is your friend.)
Sculpted by Michelangelo, it’s been making the rounds on Twitter with various versions of the same tagline. They say, ‘Michelangelo completed this work when he was 24, but then again he didn’t play video games.’ The argument is a bit over determined, if you ask me (and I say this as someone not famously fond of video games).
I love that Michelangelo managed to capture serene grief in La Pietà. Serenity is not something I traditionally think tied very closely to grief, and maybe in truth no maculated parent can manage it.
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Hortus Proprius
Hendiadys (Greek: ‘one-through-two’), endiadis, or the figure of twinnes.
A hendiadys is when we substitute two nouns for an adjective and a noun, or when we put in a substantive for an adjective, or (most broadly) when we separate two words by an ‘and’ when we might otherwise subordinate one to the other.
So one could say “she came in from the wind and the weather” when he really meant “she came in from the windy weather.”
Or one could say “words of wisdom” for “wise words”. This also suggests where hendiadys is most common, at least in English: some ordinary, informal, and indeed hackneyed expressions.
‘Just try and hit me.’
‘I am nice and cool’
‘The boys are out back for some rough and tumble play.’
Yet it’s also used in some of our greatest literature. Shakespeare in particular was a fan of it, at least through his glorious shinning period.
“It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
(Macbeth 5.5.26)
“I have told you what I have seen and heard; but faintly, nothing like the image and horror of it.” (King Lear 1.2.182)
“Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!” (Hamlet 1.4.43)
“The heartache and the natural shocks that flesh is heir to” (Hamlet 3.1.70)
Hendiadys is also quite common in the Bible:
“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” (Matthew 6:13)
“I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.” (Psalms 116:1)
Forsyth argues that part of the trick of hendiadys is that you rarely know when it’s happening. For example, in the Philippians, St. Paul writes, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” Does that mean we should work it out with fearful trembling or with both fear and with trembling? It is not altogether clear.
Likewise, a man might tell his lover, “I like your beauty and your eyes”, and he could mean either ‘I like your beautiful eyes’ or he could mean ‘I like your beauty in general and your eyes in particular.’
When Hamlet talks about “the whips and scorns of time” (3.1.78), does he mean both how time cuts and how it slanders a man? Or does he really mean “scornful whips”? Shakespeare often gets around this confusion by the number of his verb or pronoun.
“The heaviness and the guilt within my bosom
Takes off my manhood”
(Cymbeline 5.2.1)
“But in the gross and scope of my opinion,
This bodes some strange eruption to our state.”
(Hamlet 1.1.68)
In both cases, the hendiadys is followed by a word (’takes’ or ‘this’) which points to the singular nature of the expression — the one out of which Shakespeare’s art made two.
Hands down my best writing instructor was my one from law school, and one of her first lessons (after grinningly telling us that we should avoid foreign words — they were "verboten") was to explain that an adjective is always inferior to a sharp noun and an adverb is always inferior to a verb. While this is not wholly true (see Hart’s little piece I recommended the week before), it does work as a rule of thumb (as a rule and a thumb?). Hendiadys helps us writers defeat this rule, allowing us to turn adjectives and adverbs into nouns and verbs.
So, while the rule that one should use a noun in place of an adjective isn’t whole and true, it is…
Or, after my writing teacher grinned and told us that foreign words should be verboten, she…
In other words, the power of hendiadys is in amplification and force. Or it’s in forceful amplification — however you wish.
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A Bench Under the Trees
A reading from the Book of Numbers:
Benedicat tibi Dominus, et custodiat te.
Ostendat Dominus faciem suam tibi, et misereatur tui.
Convertat Dominus vultum suum ad te, et det tibi pacem.
(6:24-26)
The Lord bless you and guard you.
The Lord make his face known to you and have pity on you.
The Lord turn his face to you and give you peace.
Amen.
(Personal translation and my Latin isn’t good so forgive any mistakes.)
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The Ampitheter
And now a Psalm:
Psalmus David. Dominus regit me, et nihil mihi deerit:
in loco pascuæ ibi me collocavit. Super aquam refectionis educavit me,
animam meam convertit. Deduxit me super semitas justitiæ, propter nomen suum.
Nam, etsi ambulavero in medio umbræ mortis, non timebo mala, quoniam tu mecum es. Virga tua, et baculus tuus, ipsa me consolata sunt.
Parasti in conspectu meo mensam, adversus eos qui tribulant me; impinguasti in oleo caput meum; et calix meus inebrians quam præclarus est!
Et misericordia tua subsequetur me omnibus diebus vitæ meæ; et ut inhabitem in domo Domini, in longitudinem dierum.
(Vulgate)
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
(King James Version)
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Reviso Couryard et Peroratio
About a year after our last meeting, I moved away from where I tutored that boy. Yet I returned from time to time, and about three years after I’d moved, I ran into him at a local grocery store.
He walked right up to me and called me by name. Four years hadn’t wrought much in the way of change upon me, but on him it had been transformative. He was taller than me and broader, a quite beautiful young man.
‘I’ve cleaned up,’ he said. ‘I have a job and I’m taking some classes at [the local technical school]. Thank you.’
I don’t remember if he actually said, ‘thank you’, but it screamed out of his every look. I instantly knew he thought I had something to do with his redemption. I was so blindsided that I managed nothing more than an ‘I’m glad’ before waving to his mom and brother and wondering somewhat dazedly away. As I needly only a few of items, I left the store directly. But by then I’d gathered myself enough to come up to him again and shake his hand.
‘Hey. I just wanted you to know that I’m proud of you.’
‘Thank you! That means a lot.”
As always, please share this newsletter with anyone whom you think might like it. If you’ve come here without being a Scriptor, click HERE to sign up for the newsletter. 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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