A lifetime of rules, and a late reckoning with what escapes them.
I have devoted my life to grammar, and I begin at last to suspect that grammar has been, all along, a species of consolation, a bulwark I erected against a disorder I lacked the courage to name. For what is syntax if not the promise that the world can be arranged, that subject will find its predicate and cause its consequence, that meaning will arrive on schedule at the terminus of a well-formed sentence? I believed this promise with the fervour of a zealot. I am no longer certain it was ever kept.
As a young philologist I was intoxicated by rules, by the austere elegance of a paradigm fully declined. Language, I thought, was a cathedral of implacable logic, and the grammarian its humble sacristan, dusting the pews, correcting the errant apostrophe, maintaining the edifice against the vulgar erosions of common speech. I mistook prescription for preservation. It did not occur to me that a living language is precisely the thing that cannot be preserved, that its vitality resides in exactly those irregularities I laboured so pedantically to expunge.
The errors came for me slowly, then all at once. A student would utter some barbarism, some construction unsanctioned by any authority I revered, and I would open my mouth to correct her, and find that the correction died on my tongue, because her sentence, ungrammatical though it was, had said something my impeccable periods could not. Meaning, it transpired, was forever leaking out of the vessels I had built to contain it, seeping through the mortar, pooling in the very fissures I had been trained to seal.
I do not wish to be misunderstood, in this of all confessions. I am not renouncing rigour for the fashionable anarchy that mistakes incoherence for liberation. A sentence that means nothing is not a triumph over grammar; it is merely a failure of a different and lazier kind. What I am relinquishing is the graver conceit: the belief that the rules I served were the source of meaning rather than its provisional and negotiable servants, that language obeyed me rather than merely, for a time, indulging my scrupulousness.
Now, in the long dusk of a scholar's retirement, I reread the sentences I once judged flawless and find them embalmed, correct as a laid-out corpse is correct, and about as eloquent. The living speech I disdained goes on without me, ungovernable, incorrigible, luminous with the errors through which alone anything new has ever been said. I have come, belatedly, to a peace of sorts, though it is a peace bound up with a lucid and unappeasable regret.
If I have a bequest, it is this admonition, offered to whatever pupil is patient enough to receive it. Learn the rules with all the devotion I lavished on them, for you cannot break with dignity what you have not first mastered. But do not mistake, as I did for the better part of a lifetime, the scaffold for the building, the grammar for the utterance, the map so lovingly annotated for the unruly and inexhaustible country it was only ever meant, however imperfectly, to describe.