Books and their readers and non-readers, occasional readers, dip-in-and-out readers are in many ways the main subjects of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books.
Leah's Price's 2019 What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is informative and witty. It resonates differently in the pandemic's later stages than when published two years ago. Since March 2020, immersion in a world made of words (whether printed or digital) has taken on new life, sometimes sharply (Kendi's How To Be An Anti-Racist), sympathetically (Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half) and sometimes purely escapist (The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires).
Not only does Price quash numerous assumptions about books, readers, libraries, and futurists, she unearths the work of many editors, designers, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and reviewers who mediate the business of books between author and reader. Their invisible work is usually missed only in its absence: just try reading a error-filled, typo-rich self-published e-book on Amazon to get the point. Full credit to print book interior designer Jeff Williams, cover photographer Laura Hennessey and designer Chin-Yee Lee, research assistant Maia Silber. Since the author's acknowledgements are in alphabetical order, I am not sure which person is her editor at Basic Books/Hachette.
Books and their readers and non-readers, occasional readers, dip-in-and-out readers are in many ways the main subjects. Price has taught book history and English at Harvard and Rutgers. She has a sharp eye for the telling detail as well as the point of academic theories and critical turns.
Price overturns many assumptions both by readers and those who claim reading is becoming a non-issue. Why do both fetishize cover-to-cover reading of literary classics when that has always been a small minority of all book uses? She looks at what books can tell us about their users: which pages are thumbed, marked, dog-eared, which apparently untouched. The myth of the ideal book complements the myth of the ideal reader, and both are conveniently misleading.
The remarkable ignorance regarding book history and usage by those who first designed digital book readers led to costly and avoidable mistakes for Amazon, Barnes & Noble (the sad Nook) and Apple. The confident predictions of futurists and disruptors have time and again been left blowin' in the wind even as books have changed significantly at every turn of technology, social history, and political ideology.
The jacket image and design perfectly illustrate Price's points: red bordered page scrolling around bindings suggest the codex, the scroll, readers' uses and abuses, as well as the flames that have consumed libraries, readers, and régimes (the biblioclastic Fahrenheit 451; Winston Smith's tell-tale paperweight in 1984; Savonarola's, Trollope's, and Tom Wolfe's bonfires of vanities and Josef Goebbel's bonfires of books and their authors). As in Matthew Battles' The Library: An Unquiet History, books have as often attracted scorn and destruction as they have acclaim and conservation: books as sources of power, fear, and disruption.
Price's book is subtitled The History and Future of Reading. Universities often discount the presence of books because they are so routine. Undergraduates who seem unwilling, unable, or simply disinclined to read (as assigned, or on their own) may not be the accurate bell-weather faculty and administrators believe them to be. Sales and circulation of printed and digital books were both up during the pandemic, sometimes constrained by availability. Book sales were up 12% between June and mid-August 2020 compared with ten weeks' prior numbers.
Books have at the forefront of numerous developments in marketing: door-to-door marketing, consumer credit, self-serve retail sales, and online direct. Every time books have been proclaimed as dead (including Thomas Edison's confident predictions in 1913), they have had a way of sneaking back, whether hardbound, paperbound, or digital, print or serialized. Much hinges on whether time for reading of any kind will be available in surveillance gig-work economy. Price is confidently warns that "the experience of immersion in a world made of words will survive in and only if readers continue to carve out places and times to have words with one another."
Bryan Alexander's Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education, and Joshua Kim's and Edward Maloney's Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education (both 2020 from Johns Hopkins University Press) set very different boundaries and take very different approaches to their subject.
Bryan Alexander's Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education, and Joshua Kim's and Edward Maloney's Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education (both 2020 from Johns Hopkins University Press) set very different boundaries and take very different approaches to their subject. Yet they are also fascinating to read in imaginary dialog: the one expansive, the other organizational; the one a futurist's set of questions and the other seeking to establish a new discipline and its role in academia as well as on any particular campus. They don't say similar things, but they do offer contrasting and useful perspectives.
Academia Next is by a futurist, and if you're allergic to futurist kinds of thinking, stop here (or skip to below). Alexander is trying to extrapolate likely, possible, or unexpected consequences from visible trends, and ask what are possible, desirable, and aspirational scenarios by 2035. Like other examples in the futurist genre, he might be faulted for inadequately understanding the complexities and contingencies of historical causation, which neither repeats nor hardly ever rhymes (pace Mark Twain). In addition, historical development is hardly continuous improvement in one direction: there are lapses, losses, lacunae, and outright blunders which will be forever hard to explain.
Nevertheless, Alexander's scenarios can be variously compelling and repellant: (1) higher education in decline; or (2) higher education as an adjunct to "health care nation;" or (3) higher education transformed by open resources, scholarship, and enrollments; or (4) the "augmented" campus or face-to-face learning with significant augmented and mixed reality; or (5) more automated learning ("Siri, tutor me") or (6) the self-consciously retro campus that carefully limits digital entanglements. Alexander mentions the very real problems of digital security, and articulated understandings of privacy and self-ownership of data only in passing. The potential growth of a surveillance campus that would rival China's surveillance state carries numerous moral and legal questions. Exactly who is entrusted with all that information, and if outside vendors, then under which circumstances? Cui bono? student, administrator, parent, government official, funding lender, teacher?
Academia Next was published on the cusp of the multiple meltdowns of 2020: pandemic, economy, anti-racism, and paranoid conspiracy-mongering. Although these entangled crises might have disqualified Alexander's futurism, they erve to focus what is at stake in higher education: cui bono? again. Current forecasts for what will change or remain the same in higher education post-pandemic, post-neoliberal economics, post-conspiracy are doubtless premature, and the real gains or losses are bound to be unexpected or only half-expected: things fall apart (and racism, alas, is unlikely to dissipate quickly). Through all that he knew about in early 2020, and learned in subsequent events, Alexander calls for clarity of vision, courage, and persistence: the traditional values of higher education will not be entirely misplaced and some expensive commitments will continue to be worthwhile.
Kim's & Maloney's Learning Innovation is decidedly more modest regarding the future, and grounded regarding current practice. They ask what are the organizational, pedagogical, and disciplinary consequences of presently developing theoretical frameworks, methodological practices, shared challenges, and goals as regards learning innovation? K&M unpack the title words themselves (learning, innovation), and their chapters on changing understandings of learning and institutional change clarify many issues often buried in the bustle of actively producing instruction.
K&M's chapter "Reclaiming Innovation from Disruption" alone is worth the price of the book: they show carefully how "disruptive innovation" poorly serves higher education (especially when devotees to the cult throw shade on anyone who questions it). Higher education is a complex ecosystem; learners are not products; higher education is diverse. The fundamental orientation towards sharing learning, ideas, and plans, right down to budgets, communications strategies, and technical know-how "would shock anyone who has spent a career in the corporate world." It is easier to ask what is not shared than what is. K&M's brief history of PLATO, the 40-year progenitor of all subsequent digital learning platforms clinches their case. The oft-unexamined faith that new technologies will disrupt the future of colleges and universities almost always ignores the history of educational technologies and erases the impact of other sources of change. (This is a pertinent rejoinder to Alexander, as above.)
Academia Nextat this date is available in SHU library only in print copy; Learning Innovationis available both in print and online (with unlimited concurrent users, and printing or e-mailing unlimited pages). Learning Innovation is easy to read as long as you can bear to read from a screen. (A leading cause of eye strain during the pandemic.) I hear Buzz Lightyear: "To infinity and beyond!"
Hisham Matar's book A Month in Siena is a beautiful volume that speaks of memory, loss, art, and finally some qualified hope.
Towards the end of the book, as he looks at Paradise by Giovanni di Paolo, painted around 1445, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum. The painting shows pairs (and one trio) of individuals greeting each other, as if from a long absence or journey. Matar writes:
What is it for the dead to remember the living, I wondered, to still be able to recognize those we knew when the soul was flesh . . .
That must surely be the ambition of every reunion, not only to identify and be identified, but also to have an accurate account of al that has come since the last encounter. And it must surely follow that what lies behind our longing and nostalgia is exactly this need to be accounted for. . . . We want to be seen by [those closest to us] and, in turn, rediscover our own powers of remembrance, and finally to find the consolation that lies between intention and expression, between the concealed sentiment and its outward shape. The painting understands this. It knows that what we wish for most, even more than paradise, is to be recognized; that regardless of how transformed and transfigured we might be by the passage, something of us might sustain and remain perceptible to those we have spent so long loving. Perhaps the entire history of art is the unfolding of this ambition: that every book, painting, or symphony is an attempt to give a faithful account for all that concerns us.
Is that not the power of an education, even an education in the liberal arts, to attempt to give that faithful account? Is not the deep knowledge of the liberal arts the felt-and-touched experience of being seen by works of art, buildings, texts of all kinds, music, the biological world, the realm of physics? That something might sustain and remain perceptible to those we have spent to long loving.
Is this not exactly why an education in the liberal arts can never be marketed, and in the commodified space of the self as defined by neoliberal capitalism, so impossible to sell?
David Ulin's The Lost Art of Reading (subtitle: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time) was published in 2010 on the basis of essays in the Los Angeles Times (where he had been a book critic) and other publications. Gary Luke, the former editorial director of Sasquatch Books (Seattle) persuaded Ulin to recast his writing and publish his expanded essay as a book in 2010. In 2018 together they published a new edition, with a new introduction and afterword, which expanded his original article and brought it forward to the age of the short-fingered vulgarian casino operator from Queens, in the memorable phrases by Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen.
The gist of the essay remains the same: the quiet, focus, and concentration required of deep reading of long-form fiction is hard to summon up in the age of the web, of the shouting multitudes on every side, and of the way that all our concentration and reading attention has been cracked if not shattered by the combination of political and technological disasters of the past decade. "We are in the midst of a broken story, and we have lost the ability to parse its lines." (p. xv) Some of the stories are what Ulin (and many others) fear: the stories of racism, the fear of all kinds of others, the ready labeling of disagreement as treason or heresy. "I have come to recognize that all these narratives of incomplete and every one turns out to be unfulfilling, because none of them add up to a vision larger than themselves." (p. xviii) Yet "every narrative is conditional" and "we can live only in our own time." (p. xxi-xxii) Surveying both the positive and horrifying narratives of American history and literature, Ulin writes:
I don't mean to trivialize our situation by referring to it through the lens of narrative, but rather to contextualize. This is how the world works: first we tell ourselves a story, then we dream our way inside as a way of bringing it to life. it's why we have to be careful about the narratives we evoke or create, because they are bound by (or they bind) the limits of what we can imagine, the limits of our ability to think. . . . [This is] a difficult world in which to be human, in which to try to live with integrity. . . Why do I read? I am looking for authority, intelligence. . . . But even more, I seek engagement—with both the text and the creator of the text. . . . Faith again, some sort of transfiguration, the closest we come to real communion between ourselves and another who shares with us something in common (common cause, common courtesy, common knowledge, common sense). . . . Why should we fear one another's stories? The true act of resistance is to respond with hope. All those voices are what connect us. In a culture intent on keeping us divided, they are, they have been always, the necessary narrative. (p. xxvii—xxxiii)
The connective thread of narratives, both the horrifying and the hopeful, have made 2018 look almost like a preface. Ulin refused to give up hope, and for good reason. Through the ravages of pandemic, policing brutalities, willful cruelty and grift at the highest levels of power, some hope can emerge. The 2020 election answered the grifter in the only way really possible (even as he refuses to acknowledge it). The pandemic has revealed cleavages in America that can no longer be ignored, even though many will try, will deny, will stonewall. In the ravages of pandemic, how can we not all sense this is but a dress rehearsal for the disasters of climate change. People have risen up and refused to give up hope, refused simply to accept corruption, brutality, and incompetence, even though many voted to continue those things exactly. Ulin saw signs of a quiet protest in art, a reclamation of aesthetic faith. As in February 2018, so in November and December 2020, in Samuel Becket's words, "I can't go on, I'll go on." (p. 156)
For those concerned with liberal arts traditions and education, Ulin's essay now reads as a call to memory that became a call to action. Narratives can still connect; we can still imagine our way into a world and inhabit it. In aesthetic terms—in all the arts—we will all only begin to acknowledge, lament, and celebrate the immense disasters, griefs, and passions of this year. That reckoning may (or should) go on for a generation. Unlike the historical response to the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, we can't and won't simply ignore it and forget it. The lost of art of reading can lead to the new art of connecting, the new narrative cobbled together on the streets, from disorientation, "art as communion, art as community, art as (yes) resistance in the sense that it invites or provokes us to complexity." Ulin might be willing to extend it, in his own heritage, as tikkun olam: to rebuilt the ancient ruins, repair the breach, and restore the streets to live in.
Virginia Woolf's essay, like most of her writing, is densely layered and ironically subversive. Among her several layers one finds a gently devastating critique of privilege (gender, class, ethnicity), critical yet bold imagination, vivid insights into characters, and a range and command of literature rarely equaled elsewhere. All in 5,500 words, give or take. (For a fine discussion see R. Fowler's 1983 article.)
Start with the title. Far from not knowing Greek, it is quickly apparent that Woolf knows Greek exceedingly well. Her knowledge sets her apart in her time. In Victorian and Edwardian English upper middle classes, Greek was taught to "public" (prep) school boys as a formal or expected requirement to Oxford or Cambridge, the universities of the ruling class. Knowing Greek was a badge of membership in gender and class. It was part and parcel of the cultural colonialism that brought ancient Greek art to the British Museum, an attitude shared with German and French rivals (and others), and founded British academies in Athens and Rome. A British schoolboy or undergraduate, with ancient Greek, was imagined or supposed to understand the ancients better than modern Greeks. They had become lazy southerners, who had somehow missed all their shots since at least the Byzantine Empire. On the surface, not knowing Greek is exactly what the essay is not about.
Woolf challenges that exclusive attitude of privilege in her first paragraph:
For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition.
Privileged English males hold the same position as everyone else. School and university study of Greek does not convey a special knowledge shared by the elite: we're all in the same boat, at the bottom of any class of schoolboys. At several points Woolf drives the point of the "tremendous breach of tradition," or elsewhere, "The Greeks remain in a fastness of their own."
Woolf's crucial argument is simple: we don't know how Greek sounded. The written language only hints at the spoken, and the spoken had to be direct. Sophocles had to speak with an instant immediacy: "every sentence had to explode on striking the ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might descend, and however enigmatic their final purport might be." With knowing how ancient Greek sounded, we truly lack a means to comprehend them fully.
Woolf's Greeks lived in an outdoor, public, sunlit life transacted in the street during those months of warmth and fine weather: their speech mirrored their environment of earth and stone. Such a life required and produced an oral, performative culture. Woolf's remaining English prejudices lead her to imagine that such an outdoor life inspires "that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races" that is "known to all who visit Italy." (One thinks of Forster's A Room With A View.) She compares such a life with "the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors." Her life as a sheltered, upper-middle-class young woman apparently shielded her from the rough-and-tumble British street life portrayed by Dickens, Chesterton, or even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those outdoorsy ancient Greeks certainly excelled stuffy English households bifurcated between upstairs and downstairs.
Woolf saw in Plato an exception, insofar as "winter fell on these villages, and "There must have been some place indoors where men could retire" and where "they sit and drink, where they could lie stretched at their ease, where they could talk." Enter the symposium: "some handsome boy ventured a question, or quoted an opinion, and Socrates took it up, fingered it, turned it round, looked at it this way and that" and "brought the whole company by degrees to gaze with him at the truth." She alludes to Greek homophilia, not to say homo-eroticism (exactly what is Socrates fingering?). At the end of this extended scene, "Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties." Socrates' sense of beauty was never simply ornament. "Naturally, living in the open, it was not the lip or the eye that struck them, but the carriage of the body and the proportions of its parts." A male body, one might add. "Thus when we quote and extract we do the Greeks more damage than we do the English."
Woolf brings us round to her first observation: the Greeks "could say, “If to die nobly is the chief part of excellence, to us out of all men Fortune gave this lot; for hastening to set a crown of freedom on Greece we lie possessed of praise that grows not old." —"But again (the question comes back and back), Are we reading Greek as it was written when we say this?" The cultural chasm has never closed, "Does not the whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature? They admit us to a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind. Every word is reinforced by a vigour which pours out of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the young." The distance admits more mistakes and errors: "Back and back we are drawn to steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of the reality, not the reality itself, a summer’s day imagined in the heart of a northern winter." The unapproachable language itself both extends the Greek's binding influence and our misunderstanding.
We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which aphrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless, it is the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which perpetually lures us back.
The language is both our means of approach and evidence of our inability to approach the Greeks. "Greek is the impersonal literature; it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no schools; no forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a gradual process working in many men imperfectly until it expresses itself adequately at last in one." Woolf's examples: "Thus we have Sappho with her constellations of adjectives; Plato daring extravagant flights of poetry in the midst of prose; Thucydides, constricted and contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and quietly, apparently motionless, and then, with a flicker of fins, off and away." Finally we have the Odyssey, the "triumph of narrative . . . the instinctive story-telling of a sea-faring race." Its people are full-grown, "crafty, subtle, and passionate." Its world of the sea "separates island from island has to be crossed by little hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of the sea-gulls." Its characters "actions seem laden with beauty."
. . . They do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate.
The characters in the Odyssey stand in the shadow of that fate, and yet are "alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure." The concluding sentence of this dense essay finally voices Woolf's thorough critique: "it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own time."
At the beginning, Woolf succinctly dissolved the élite privilege that pretended that we are not all in the same boat: "in our ignorance [of Greek] we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys." In the end, she critiques the whole comfortable, English ideological structure of Empire, Church, and University. Her mention of John Paston, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith (a Radical Liberal), Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen range her with relative outsiders to the ideology of Crown and Mitre. One can forget how marginal and dubious these authors may have been in a conventional upper-middle-class English household. Woolf was raised in stultifying Victorian and Edwardian Anglican Christianity which did so much to restrict her intellectual development and personal freedom as a woman.
The Greeks offered Woolf a way out of this plush tomb, and prepared Woolf for the kind of reader that she hoped or imagined for her writing. The startlingly clear-sightedness of the Greeks let her see her own oppressive, imperialist society for what it was. Knowing Greek, a presumed mark of élite education and privileged position, is in fact the basis for the devastating social critique implicit in her novels. Knowing Greek, as the official mark of high status, reveals truly not knowing Greek, for the real knowledge of Greek demands a clarity of vision that will completely discount the pretense of privilege.
"On not knowing Greek" equals "on not knowing yourself and your society," against Socrates' watchword: know thyself. Like Socrates, Woolf brings her reader by degrees to gaze with her at the truth. "What matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of reaching it." A fitting epigram for this most remarkable and insightful author. How much she would have loved that life outside that she idealizes in her essay.
The secret of knowing Greek, then, is to critique the very society that pretends that the person who knows Greek accepts his place (and I do mean his). Knowing Greek is a deadly arrow against the pretense of a tradition shot from directly within that tradition. Knowing Greek—on "not knowing Greek"—is an inside job.
In a time that is beyond unsettling and strange, I have found some comfort in returning to contemplate what a liberal arts education is or was, and how it interacted with elements in American culture which were horribly flawed with systemic racism. Such an education, when it worked, offered a way out of lying, self-delusion, and social delusion. For me, a liberal arts education above all meant engaging with ancient Greek and Roman writers.
While the label "classics" is unquestionably, unfashionably elitist and redolent of a great deal of European and American imperialism, it points out the way these ancient writers set a template for understanding tragedy, grief, and loss. These writers seem to read us as much as we read them: the warnings they suggest about how a life, world, and culture can fall apart is more pertinent with each passing month.
In these past several disastrous and tragic months, I was enlivened to read Andrea Marcolongo's The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek. La lingua geniale in the original Italian: "ingenious" is not an incorrect translation, but neither is it sufficient: ingenious suggests superficially clever rather than boldly inventive. The language provides undeniable evidence that ancient Greeks thought in a precise and different manner than how we might imagine them to have thought. As L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" —especially when the past is so remote and long ago.
I wish to turn to this theme of the utter strangeness of ancient Greek in some longer elegy for the liberal arts and the role the might have or could have played in American culture in the past two centuries. The two elements of aspect and mood in the ancient Greek language carry this water: these elements of verbs structure a different world of thinking through that channel, that language.
In English, the nouns do a great deal of the work of making sense transparent from writer to reader. In Greek, the verbs do the work. Aspect encodes a way of thinking about verbs and actions that go to the heart of Greek sense-making. Because most later languages so lack verbal aspect, it is impossible to describe without using too many words.
Begin with English. English verbs are locked into the iron frame of time: past, present, and future. What the person who acts intends by the action is either beside the point or rendered through adverbs or some other locution. Maybe the action is a layered past —before such-and-so happened, this-and-that had already happened (a past perfect), or some kind of ordering of future affairs: when that-and-this will happen, such-and-so will already have happened (a future perfect). In any case, the verbal periphrastic combinations establish an intricate temporal order.
Greek verbs live with but the haziest notion of this iron law of past, present, and future. A present aspect is durative: it's happening right now and maybe into an infinite future. (Marcolongo's example, "I'm calling you," καλέω) The aorist aspect (a-orist means indefinite or without bounds; an ὁριστής is a boundary-maker, with the α-negative or privative) is momentary, taken as such (and not necessarily in the past!) (Marcolongo's example: an idea of calling you, "I'll call you," έκάλεσα with no reference to when in present or future.) The perfective aspect is a completed action that stands completed with no going back on it. (Marcolongo's example: κέκληκα, I called you --and you never called back, lost the note by the phone, or are ignoring me). These aspects do not function as temporal "when" signals, but as "how" performative signals that take time, or are not yet in time or stand-or-fall on the facts. Ancient Greek retains aspect of verbs from the fabled proto-Indo-European language (that maybe never was), as does Serbo-Croatian, Hawaiian, and in some was African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
In modern languages, aspect and time become conflated: when it happened is taken to mean how it happened. Many Greek verbs have three distinct stems that are conjugated in different aspects: their suffix-like endings indicate 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person and singular or plural (or dual, another topic entirely). "I look and I am looking," όράω is a present durative action: still looking. What grammarians call the "future" ὄψομαι is really much more an indefinite intention: I'll look when I get around to it, I intend to look. The Greeks were not much interested in characterizing the future: it simply had to be experienced, like the will of the gods. The aorist εἷδον is I look, once, and that was enough, because: now the perfect: I am in the state of having seen, which is; I know οἴδα, and finally ὤφθην, I looked and it's a matter of record: it's known that I looked. That all these verb parts are stitched together by grammarians and lexicographers does not mean that ordinary ancient Greeks thought them related: they simply used them as the wished to make themselves clear.
Dividing how an action occurs from when it occurs is obvious only to a modern speaker of a few languages (Serbo-Croatian; Hawaiian). A bit closer to most Americans, the aspectual distinctions in African American Vernacular English, which sometimes obscure tense (time), can be the habitual, perfective, or resultant: "he do be eating," "he have bin ate," "he have done ate" (properly "dən ate"). Those may not tie the past or present action of eating to a time-frame, but indicate how it happens, or happens, or what is the result of it happening. This comparison begins to get at the power of aspect: how it happened.
To their credit, authors of high school or college grammars of ancient Greek, such those by as Herbert Weir Smyth, James Hadley & F. D. Allen, or H.L. Crosby & J.N. Schaeffer, completely fail to mention aspect, which seems to have come into the study of ancient Greek from comparative study of Slavic languages; the first OED entry for grammatical aspect dates to 1853. Joseph Dongell's much more recent Elementary New Testament Greek (2014) incorporates an unavoidably confusing discussion of aspect as internal (inside the event, "I am washing the car"), external (suspended above & viewing the action as a simple singular event: "Today we wash the car," as a flat description), and perfect: once-and-done "I'm happy to say I have washed the car". Dongell then muddies the water a bit with discussion of a perspective chosen by the speaker and not property of an action itself. His example is Jesus' resurrection, always a loaded topic (best stay away from it). When he notes that verbal aspect doesn't tell us very much about how to picture an event in reality, he appeals to the developing idea of a "fuller picture" of a verb called Aktionsart, a "type of action" distinguishing elements of activity, accomplishment, achievement, and state. Aktionsart picks apart categories on a grid of perception to get at a "fuller picture" a verb does, and has little practical consequence. Aspect is the contrary: by distinguishing how an action occurs: how a verb "walks" (as it were), Greeks could pick apart sense from nonsense. Plato wields aspect very carefully (see Timeaus 37e—38c: please don't complain that Timeaus isn't or wasn't by Plato)(See also two entries by Seumas Macdonald here and here.)
This recondite aspective element of verbs combines with a second perspective on ancient Greek verbs: mood. The subjunctive mood in modern English is nearly disappearing, but most of us can still remember the subjective, distinguishing "was he a fool?" from "were he fool." In the first, he was or wasn't a fool, or perhaps we can disagree about that; but the second points to the real possibility that he isn't or wasn't but could be, might be, or might have been. "I wouldn't bring up Paris if I were you. It's poor salesmanship," Ricky admonishes Elsa in Casablanca. (English also has the infinitive mood, to do something, and the imperative mood, do something! but they don't matter so much here.)
But ancient Greek adds a third mood: optative, the mood of desire. The optative depends on the slight shift in the speaker's desire and the conditions that might allow it. Marcolongo's examples are clear: "I want to sail/intend to sail" (indicative: my boat is docked, I'm ready); "I would like to sail; I might go sailing" (subjective: My boat is docked but the winds are foul); "I would like to sail/I might go sailing" (optative: My boat is docked; I don't know how to sail; I'll have to learn how and then I really want to), finally back to: "I would like to sail/I would have liked to sail" (but I don't have a boat; I live in Kansas; it's a lost cause--indicative again).
What separates those moods? Possibility, the speaker's projection of desire, and perception of herself as strong enough, brave enough, even decisive enough. That volitional optative is completely dependent upon her sense of responsibility and resolve to turn words into action.
Both desire and regret (negative in the optative) might not draw a line between possibility and impossibility, the desire that it might come true versus the historic indicative which indicates that it never will come true. If the odds are ever in your favor, as they say in Hunger Games, it could be optative (or merely subjective: they'll change, you know); if the odds are that you're going to die, the indicative. Between the poles of real and unreal is a whole force field of human desire, likelihood, or impossibility. That's where the optative supplements the subjective—but was utterly lost as Greek spread in the Alexandrian world. Hence in the New Testament, the only real optative is μὴ γένοιτο: may it not be! which the Authorized Version plumped up as:" God forbid!" The optative became a sort of second-string, bench-team subjective.
There are uses of the optative mood: volitional ("I want to write"); potential ("I could write") and oblique ("He said that I would write"), but enough already. When Odysseus says "Would that I were young and my strength firm," his fervent and binding desire is so strong that he uses the optative for the tenacity of his intention to return to Ithaka and reclaim his ancestral seat, even though it is (or seems) impossible. (Odyssey 14:70-71)
Back to our perilous present in which many wait in dread for violence they believe will ensue after the 2020 election. The liberal arts spoke to a nation that had been divided by war, failed to liberate and reconstruct, and stood by while robber barons plundered the wealth of many in the first Gilded Age. Liberal education, nevertheless, offered a way out of predatory capitalism and cultural enslavement to a renewed sense of purpose, even with its blind spots, that resulted in the achievements of the Progressive era and laid the foundations for the New Deal. The means of this education were a steady focus on language, on truth and its expression, on desire, on the aspect of how things come to be, choosing to hope in the optative in the face of impossibility.
That education was an heir of those who wrote an English language that we have lost the ability to speak accurately. Its speakers picked apart truth and desire because they mattered more than market indices and predictions of future profit. The care with which the far more remote ancient Greeks thought, about how things happen and how they desired them to happen contrasts oddly with their rather simplistic and one-dimensional view of the future. (Greek future verbs are almost an afterthought.) With the (controversial) advent of writing, they picked apart these elements in texts that lack punctuation and diacritics. Their flow of thought depended on particle and enclitics, those little bits of words that signaled the flow of thinking and of speech. Liberal arts educations --there was more than one model--flourished in an America culture that prized language and its use: the Lyceum circuits, Milton, the Bible, even Emerson. That care with language was a direct ally of intensive study of Latin and ancient Greek literatures.
I am working out more thoughts about these topics, using other concepts as well: what I have written is only a workshop model, a sketch, and maybe a bad one. The foundation of the liberal arts, the careful usage and analysis of expressive language, was foundational and now almost extinct outside of few precincts of wealthy institutions. Whether such an education can ever return is another subject.
