“Dread disaster smote his breasts with grief; so, panting
from out his lungs’ very depths, he sobbed for anguish.”
For the record, I would just like to state that my initial reaction to the example sentence
was not, “Ah, yes! Look how easily the plural will be understood from the singular!”
It was more of visercal, heartbeat kind of feeling—one that
thudded through every nerve in my chest and lungs at once, and may have left my
jaw open a couple inches.
On Page 244, our anonymous author rather introduces our text, this
third and final part of his ‘Rhetorica…’ by
saying:
“Laymen, reading good orations and poems, approve the
orators and poets, but without comprehending what has called forth their
approval, because they cannot know where that which especially delights them
resides, or what it is, or how it was produced.”
He goes on to explain how the true and noble art of example, therefore, is to demonstrate those examples of the highest or most exemplary sort, and then reduce them to a series of individual constituents. Thus enlightened, the fine scholar can continue on to apply such pieces in entirely new forms and shapes, as dismantling a brick wall can bestow one with an inspiring quantity of new material.
But while the Greeks are bashed in this piece for bringing
up past pieces as primary substance instead of learning from them, I feel there
is an equally important role in their hypothetical methods, just like the
‘average’ layperson, thunderstruck with reverent awe at the appearance of
something beyond all of his or her comprehension. For while it’s true that
sheer wonder or respect of something without action is not productive or even
serious in the eyes of our anonymous author (and I do believe he exaggerates,
just a tad, on the habits of those admittedly inordinately wide-mouthed
Greeks), I believe it disregards the other, equally useful half of example. The
tangible, eureka-esque moment of comprehending completely something concrete is
essential to human knowledge, but behind that— blind, wide-eyed inspiration—
is, I believe equally as functional.
One of my most-utilized works of text is a ‘manual’ by
Greenville Kleiser called, concisely, ‘Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases: A
Practical Handbook of Pertinent Expressions, Striking Similes, Literary,
Commercial, Conversational, and Oratorical Terms, for the Embellishment of
Speech, and Literature, and the Improvement of the Vocabulary of Those Who
Read, Write, and Speak English.”
It, like Rhetorica Ad
Herennium, is a sort of a guidebook. But, unlike the ancient text, this one
gives none of the inner workings of the phrases it lists. It instead suggests
readers to record the ones which most strike them, to create a list to return
to. Or, basically, to bask and steep in the inspirational. Is the ultimate intent imitation? Doubtless verbatim use
of such phrases will sneak around, if you read or return to this book often enough.
But more than and beyond that is the true purpose I see in inspiration: it
becomes habit. Without thinking, we ‘laymen’ begin to know good prose from bad;
without trying, we become ‘intuitive experts’ at grammar, and narrative, and,
dare I say it, rhetoric.
To sit on inspiration with dead modesty is, as our anonymous
author suggests, of course inane. But the Greeks, perpetually overcome with the
divine magic of the Muses, transmuted such power and contemplative reflection into one of the most
exquisitely beautiful facets of human history, though the material from one
didn’t necessarily come directly from the other.
Nitty-gritty knowledge is never anything but a benefit. But
so much of our existence is blind intuition, and intuition comes from
collective, a string of intangible epiphanies.
It’s the reason you shouldn’t ever discount the layman who
knows the good art from bad at a gallery. The world exists in feelings and
emotions, not rules or words, and the latter only exists because of the first.
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