Time flies, even when you’re not having fun
I miss writing letters. From college into my late twenties, several friends and I regularly exchanged letters. Life’s insatiable appetite for our time, estrangements and dissentions, but also marriages and children, have gotten in our way since. Ovid writes that “Time glides stealthily past in its fleeting passage, unnoticed; nothing has greater speed than the years” (Metamorphoses, Book 10, 518, trans. David Raeburn), and now my wife and I exchange letters around our birthdays, anniversary, and on Mother’s and Father’s Day, but this house is otherwise letterless – unless these letters to you, dear readers, count.
And count, indeed they do! I’ve missed our little conversations, and I hope you have as well. Thank you for putting up with a particularly long hiatus. So much has passed since the last letter and this one. Some of the catastrophes which induced me run out on you at the end of June are resolved, but too many of them remain, in retrospect, just as catastrophic. Yet they simultaneously look so far away. It’s hard to imagine it was just five weeks ago.
But that is one of the wonderful qualities of letters.
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The Courtyard
What quality is that? One of the wonderful qualities of letters is their temporal promiscuity. A great deal was made of this in eighteenth century literature; I’m thinking especially of Jane’s letter to Lizzy, detailing the regular ordering of the world while Lizzy is on vacation and how that letter is punctured by the horror of Lydia’s… well… Lydia’s promiscuity.
I don’t know why letters should have this power. We are not surprised when life goes on between one call and another. We are not surprised when we hear how the man next door has a new Life Event when we run into him watering his petunias after a month or three. And yet – perhaps because a letter is set out there in black and white – we do not expect time to pass while we write.
Or maybe it’s simpler. A meeting is a discrete event. A phone call also goes on for only so long (unless you’re me and have been asked by his then-girlfriend, now-wife, to explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and keep her on the phone for four hours or more). In letters, individual sentences can stretch for hours or a day or more.
This reminds me of the line, ‘You only have so many more meetings with your parents before they’re gone’. My grandmother lives about a mile from us, but she’s also 96, so I think about this every time I visit her now. I leave and I think, ‘How many more times will I talk with her?’ It gets me calling her regularly.
A letter then peels back the curtain on what all our interactions truly are, even those conversations in the morning with that neighbor. They’re not discrete events but sentences in the long letter of our life as neighbors (or grandson, or whomever). My wife's and my younger daughter recently turned one, and there are only so many naps where she’ll fall asleep on my chest. Soon she will, like our elder, just lie down on her own and go to sleep. And while every time she falls asleep on her own now we celebrate her greater independence, we mourn it also. Sentence by sentence (that is, day by day) our baby girl is growing up.
And it is a glorious, grieving thing.
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With Our Fathers
Our elder daughter has long been mature enough to use the restroom. She could have potty-trained herself almost eighteen months ago, and she definitely could have consented to us potty-training her about a year ago. But neither did she, until, that is, just last month.
We used a trick, as crude as it was effective; we took her diapers away. The first day she did decently well. The second, perhaps in protest, she did about as badly as she could. When we slapped panties on her the third day instead of a diaper, she seemingly decided we were serious and so, by the fourth day, she was fully potty-trained. Cue our celebrations, except…
Except when she danced off the toilet on that fourth day and my wife and I celebrated with her (even the baby clapped along), I realized that I would never again change her diaper. And I grew sad.
Which is rank silliness. Ignore for a moment that we are her parents and want her as responsibility and capable as we can make her (far more responsible, far more capable at eighteen than we are even now if possible), but (and this may surprise you) I never particularly liked changing diapers. The trouble and expense alone! Having one child potty-trained feels like a little miracle. And yet…
And yet I am still, even as I type this, a little sad.
She and I recently watched Disney’s original Mulan, and so perhaps the best way to phrase this celebratory sadness is by saying “My baby is all grown up and saving China.”
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Flowerbeds
While the degeneracies of the 19th Century led almost directly to the various hells of the 20th, I know of no century quite so full of artistic splendor. From 1789 to 1913 the outpouring from every country in Europe (and from most of the rest of the world besides), in poetry, metalworking, sculpture, painting, drama, music, essay, opera, and literature is simply unparalleled. I think it has to do with rising mass affluence combined with the mastery of an artisan age.
Born into almost the middle of this world (temporarily as well as geographically, in Ireland) was William Gerard Barry. I try to imagine what life was like in that middle-part of that century, born shortly after the potato famine cut Ireland’s population in half (from eight- to four-million and from which it has not even yet fully rebounded). So many of his parents’ friends and relatives would have died; so many would have fled to these United States. He must truly have felt in the middle of two worlds.
From 1881 to 1883, he studied painting at Cork’s Crawford School of Art. (This school became the Crawford Municipal Technical Institute in 1912, then combined with Royal Cork Institution to become the Cork Regional Technical College in 1976, and in 1997 was renamed as the Cork Institute of Technology, under which name it continued on until its abolition in 2020.) From there, Barry traveled to Paris to continue his studies at L’Académie Julian (founded in 1866 and continuing under that name until 1968 when it was folded into the ESAG Penninghen).
Though I could find very little about Barry’s life, we know he won a £30 Taylor prize in 1887 from the Royal Dublin Society. Sometime after that he travelled extensively in North America, until he settled in the Southern part of France, near the Spanish border, in in the small town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. It was here, under German occupation in 1941, he died when a bomb exploded near his house.
He was an Impressionist, sometimes dabbing a scene together with almost careless blotches of ink. My taste and knowledge of painting is amateurish, so take this as nothing more than a lover’s criticism, but Barry’s paintings seem to be perfect expressions of his time, and (perhaps for that reason) are not very exceptional examples of the his time. I hope that distinction is clear. Here are some examples:
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Untitled [A Painting of the Central Californian Coast], William Gerard Barry, early 20th Century
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And sometimes his Impressionism gives us such a light touches of darkness that his painting just shines.
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Moonlight, Inner Harbour, Boston, William Gerard Barry, 1905
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His Boston harbor painting is for my money the most masterful of the examples I have, but this early work of a (presumably French) cottage may have been what won him that Taylor prize.
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An Old Woman and Children in a Cottage Interior, William Gerard Barry, 1887
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Or it may have been this painting, the painting which first fixed my attention on Barry. I still say the Boston harbor painting shows more skill, but this painting is far more affecting. One wonders what the old woman feels in such a moment, her back somehow both erect in dignity and bent with age. One hopes she is smiling at them and returned for a moment to girlhood in their refracted joy.
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Times Flies, William Gerard Barry, circa 1887
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Hortus Proprius
Anthimeria (Greek — ‘instead of’ and ‘part’), or antimereia
Anthimeria is another Figure of Grammatical Exchange, as was enallage. Anthimeria is when one uses one part of speech for another.
“Did you see the way those blockers defenced on that last play?” (Silva Rhetoricae)
"The painful warrior famoused for fight.” (Sonnet 25.9)
“Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds.” (Romeo and Juliet, 3.5.153)
Note that in the last example, Shakepseare combines two anthimeria with two enallage. In fact, there is some dispute within the sources whether it’s not rather four enallage, with two being the special case of anthimeria. That is to say, many from the Scholar Arthur Quinn to the website Wording call enallage the genus and place both anthimeria and hendiadys as species of that genus.
But neither Peacham in his 16th Century work, nor Silva Rhetorica (compiled by BYU), nor yet again Sister Miriam Joseph make this distinction. And in fact, both Silva Rhetorica and Sister Miriam Joseph explicitly place both these figures within another genus (either the Figures of Substitution or the Figures of Grammatical Exchange, respectively).
What does this mean? For my part, I expect the confusion comes from a misunderstanding of how enallage works. As I quoted Puttenham saying when writing about enallage, the Figure has little scope in English. English minimally inflects its verbs and almost never its nouns, while neither adjective nor adverb ever inflects. Because we so rarely think about inflection in English, it may seem as if enallage is doing the same work as anthimeria. You’re just whacking on an ‘s’ to a noun or whacking off an ‘ly’ to an adjective. But that is not what you’re actually doing; the difference between enallage and anthimeria is the difference between changing inflections and changing parts of speech entirely.
Now what does it mean for how a writer may use anthimeria? Absolutely nothing. Anthimeria’s power lies in part with the vivid metaphors a skillful replacement can create.
“[The wind] hath ruffian’d so upon the sea.” (Othello 2.1.7)
"I am going in search of the great perhaps.” (Rabelais)
“[A] hand that kings Have lipp’d” (Anthony and Cleopatra, 2.5.29)
"[T]he good mind of Camillo tardied My swift command” (Winter’s Tale, 3.2.163)
"[H]e sang his didn’t he danced his did” (E. E. Cummings)
“[H]ad I come coffin’d home” (Coriolanus, 2.1.193)
“[T]he thunder would not peace at my bidding” (King Lear, 4.6.103)
To make a verb-noun anthimeria work, one must use words etymologically unrelated. One can saw with a saw but only the author would know he'd replaced the verb with the noun or vice-versa; it’s not anthimeria but polyptoton. In adjective-adverb anthimeria, this is not necessary. The very structure of the English word (adverbs generally using -ly, etc.) suffices.
An anthimeria etymologically similar does not have the power of metaphor, but it can still work. Generally, these anthimeria make a phrase memorable.
“Do not go gentle into that good night” says Dylan Thomas.
And no one would remember (except to remark that the meter didn’t fit) if he used the grammatically correct ‘Do not go gently into that good night.’
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast” said Pope, making the same decision Thomas did and for the same reasons.
“Think Different” (Apple Slogan)
In sum, the anthimeria is the exchange of one part of speech for another. It allows a writer to subtly paint a metaphor into prose and acts as a tool for memory.
Thank you
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A Bench Under the Trees
“Filling Time Filling Minds” by Nadya Williams
“Every minute of our lives, whether we are parents or not, we make choices, some consciously and others passively. Every minute that we are engaging in one activity, we are not engaging in something else that we could have been doing instead. This really is a zero-sum game… At the same time, however, I want to be clear that I am not advocating here for the industrial-era idol of squeezing the utmost out of every minute. Rather, I want us to think about who we become, and (for parents) who we cause our children to become, through how we use our time.”
In a way, Williams’s article makes this letter’s point more eloquently than I have. ‘Life stops for no man’ and we can either power through whatever petty troubles prey upon us at the moment or we can enjoy even the struggles and failures, knowing they too (even the deaths) will have plenty of sweet with the bitter in times to come. I am sure this rule is not universal; to take the most extreme example, one struggles to think of any sweet found in memories of a concentration camp. But most of us won’t face such stark contrasts and so it’s a good enough rule to be going on with, and Williams here reminds us of that with sweetness and eloquence.
“A lot with a little” by Simon Sarris
Antoine de Saint Exupéry said, “Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher” (‘It seems perfection is attained not when there’s nothing more to add but when there’s nothing more to take away’). And this is fundamentally Mr. Sarris’s argument in this article. He looks in particular at the (striking) photographs of Fan Ho and some (hilarious) Japanese senryu.
As someone who has a tendency to patter on at great length, this lovely little article which practices what it preaches acts as a necessary corrective. At the very least it makes me wish I would sometimes mend my ways. It reminds me of that haunting Hemingway story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” As my first writing manual (Stunk & White) put it: brevity is the soul of wit. If that is so, Mr. Sarris is particularly witty and I a dullard. But we already knew that.
“Book Reviews!” by Jane Clark Scharl
As a wannabe writer, it can be hard to figure out how to break into any market. This seems to me to be half the attraction to MFA writing programs, the contacts and institutional knowledge about how to be taken seriously. Well, the internet is breaking that monopolistic pipeline as it breaks every, and Mrs. Scharl is here to help.
She recently published a verse play, but has been a great writer of criticism and poems (published in places like the BBC, The American Journal of Poetry, and National Review). In a recent Twitter space (X-zone?) she lays out how a newbie can break into the criticism-writing business. If that’s an interest of yours (as it is an interest of mine), Mrs. Scharl’s rundown is quick, to the point, and organized for immediate practical action. Check it out.
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The Shed
I haven’t entirely put aside my work since June. I’ve migrated to a new computer (and a new operating system), played around with some poetry (which you probably won’t ever see I’m so bad at it), stopped trying to learn Latin through Lingua Latina per se Illustrata and started learning via Latin via Ovid, and written a letter to each of my daughters, a practice I started shortly after we knew the first one was on her way but one I’ve put since my wife ended her maternity leave for our second. I was simply overwhelmed.
But in June I did put aside the study (if ‘study’ it can be called) of Much Ado About Nothing. I plan to pick up that study this next week. So watch out for that. What I’ve read and thought socan be found here.
Thank you
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The Grotto
By far the most important reason I ran out on you all was that my step-brother died. In your mercy, please pray for Cody Walter. Thank you.
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Reviso Filiae et Peroratio
That children have personalities in the womb is a cliché, but what has been so shocking to me is how early their talents shine through. Our youngest (just one-year-old) can’t say anything but ‘mama’, ‘papa’, ‘duck’ (pronounced ‘duh’), and ‘ate’ (‘big sister’ in my wife’s native language), but she can hold the tune to Happy Birthday (at least its beginning) with seeming ease. She is indeed our pitchpipe when doing prayers, for after “Sa ngalan ng ama, anak, at espiritu santo” (‘In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit’) our youngest gives us the first several notes of the tune in which we sing the Our Father.
Our elder had her own talents. At three, she still remembers things that happened when she was eighteen months old. She remembers things so well that I and even sometimes my wife (who has the memory of ten elephants and their computer harddrives) don’t remember what she does until after she’s told us. She also is the kindest creature I’ve ever met. She’s not only almost infinitely patient with her younger sister, but when she was playing soccer (well… “playing” “soccer”) this summer, she’d stop whatever she was doing and run over to any child who’d fallen down for any reason on the field. She’d stand over him and ask if he was okay, if he needed water, if he needed anything. Then she’d look over at the unconcerned parents (who were in her mind criminally unconcerned) with a face like, ‘He’s right here…’
So we have a future doctor and musician on our hands. Which is good, for the musician will need the doctor’s support (emotional as much as financial) after we’re gone.
Until next time, I leave you with this Tweet (with this X? … let’s not get into that); do check out the picture:
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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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