Intellectual Braggart: Walking Through Dense Sentences

            That title alone kind of demonstrates my point. Lately, I’ve noticed that I enjoy reading sentences that have layered meanings, where each word is a puzzle piece, which adds a slight turn in the meaning of the sentence, creating a detailed nuanced picture. Really dense passages or poems can do this within sentences and from sentence to sentence. The latest example of this is when I was reading Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises. I am not claiming in the least to like the book or to have completely understood all of it, or grown in appreciation of economics and praxeology as much as I should.

Walk Through the Sentence

However, it is full of sentences like these, “They interpret history on the ground of a garbled vulgarization of dialectical materialism.” “a garbled vulgarization of dialectical materialism,” is such a finely crafted phrase. At first skim, it seems like it is a bunch of unrelated words, but it just means that those people, whoever they were as I now don’t remember, see history as a jumbled incorrect mess of logical consumption. However, that doesn’t sound have as good. Why? Well the “g, b, d, g” sounds in “garbled vulgarization” create a gawky lumbering effect when you read it in your head or even more so out loud. Next the ‘z’ in vulgarization creates an energy accented by the ‘d, c, t, c’ of ‘dialectical’. The combination of those sound segments creates a unique rhythmic journey for your mind to follow as it attempts to interpret the meaning of the sentence. If that sentence were a person on a walk, they would climb over some boulders and then slide down with a couple of hops over spiky rocks on the way down.

An Unfortunate Dilemma

Nevertheless, some people are simply too intimidated by sentences like those and liking them either makes you odd or a braggart. As I teach, I often help my 10^th and 12^th grade students through difficult dense passages. Typically they either think I have some freakish ability that they can never have or am just showing off. Neither attitude will help them learn anything, so I attempt to walk them through how I approach a passage. How you can use each word as a puzzle piece of a larger picture. For example in Yeat’s poem, “The Second Coming” he paints this over awful word vision of a beast,

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  

The narrator yells the words and suddenly a horrible sight emerges from the spirit of the world (spiritus mundi). It’s a sphinx with a horrifying gaze lumbering across the desert with birds circling around waiting to scavenge the remains of the people the beast will destroy. But Yeats says that in fewer words with a more exact meaning. They’re not just birds; they’re ‘indignant birds’, uncaring, self-interested, and aloof from the world. Yeats never says it’s enormous, but the fact that the narrator can only focus in on the beast’s thighs implies that it’s too large to take in all at once.

           

Depicted

This picture is from a magic the gathering card called, “Conquering Manticore” is almost an exact depiction of what this beast must look like. It even has the indignant birds faintly circling in the background. That's the horrifying image the narrator sees as he contemplates the end of the word and that's the image I hope to reveal to my students, when I teach them this poem. No, I don't want to reveal it, I want them to uncover it themselves to see the beast emerge from the sands of their imaginations. 

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Image Credit: "Bragging Rights" by Toms Baugis