Subject
Seesaws in Transparent Things
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Date
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EDITOR's Style note:
Although I have read Transparent Things many times, I don't recall that
I noticed the following gem in the novel's first paragraph.
"Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn't hear me. Perhaps if
the future existed, concretely and individually, as something
that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so
seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when
considering this or that object. It might be fun."
The comparison of past/present/future to the two ends of a teetertotter
and the present to their fulcrum is indeed amusing--as is the image of
Hugh Person sitting on the fulcrum and peering into the past and future.
What I had missed, however, is that the word "seesaw" incorporates the
present-future and past forms of the verb SEE.
(I lump present and future in "see" because English has no distinctive
form of the verb to mark the future tense, as there is for the past --
most commonly "-ed," although "see" as one of the surviving Germanic
so-called "strong" verbs retains the ablaut form marked by a vowel
change in the root. It is this vowel shift that gives VN the raw
material for his word play of "seesaw" as "teetertotter" versus "I see"
plus "I saw."
Ah, scholarship.
Although I have read Transparent Things many times, I don't recall that
I noticed the following gem in the novel's first paragraph.
"Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn't hear me. Perhaps if
the future existed, concretely and individually, as something
that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so
seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when
considering this or that object. It might be fun."
The comparison of past/present/future to the two ends of a teetertotter
and the present to their fulcrum is indeed amusing--as is the image of
Hugh Person sitting on the fulcrum and peering into the past and future.
What I had missed, however, is that the word "seesaw" incorporates the
present-future and past forms of the verb SEE.
(I lump present and future in "see" because English has no distinctive
form of the verb to mark the future tense, as there is for the past --
most commonly "-ed," although "see" as one of the surviving Germanic
so-called "strong" verbs retains the ablaut form marked by a vowel
change in the root. It is this vowel shift that gives VN the raw
material for his word play of "seesaw" as "teetertotter" versus "I see"
plus "I saw."
Ah, scholarship.