The Verbal Meadow
The god of wind, barring the periods of his most helpless emulation of his omnipotent mother Nature’s tempest, extends to us his tranquil blessing in the neonate hours of day. In those hours of his raised blessing hand, he is revivified to utmost salubrity, and illustrates the innate beauty of nature itself. For a transcendental feeling to not correspond with the inhalation of that salubrious stillness of air is an impossibility. The hours of predawn, therefore, vindicate Wordsworth’s adulation of Nature.
Yet, there is to Nature yet another interpretation; of it being “bottomlessly strange: alien, even when it is kind and beautiful; having innumerable modes of being that are not our modes; always mysteriously not personal, not conscious, not moral; often hostile and sinister; sometimes even unimaginably, because inhumanly, evil” (Aldous Huxley, Wordsworth in the Tropics). Aldous Huxley goes on to note:
A few months in the jungle would have convinced him that the diversity and utter strangeness of Nature are at least as real and significant as its intellectually discovered unity. Nor would he have felt so certain, in the damp and stifling darkness, among the leeches and the malevolently tangled rattans, of the divinely Anglican character of that fundamental unity.
Huxley, as opposed to Wordsworth, crafts a more equilibrous view of Nature, albeit perhaps the sinister elements thereof, so to say, find a more fervid expression in his essay in comparison with those which we are led to praise.
Where, however, may we witness the most beauteous manifestation of Nature? To the tiger, the jungle is the embodiment of that beauty; to the lion, the savannah; to the shark, the ocean. But each must necessarily interpret beauty in crude, survivalistic terms; indeed, not the most opulent palace with the most resplendent throne could educe that regal self-confidence within a tiger that would his freedom to hunt at will in the unfathomable depths of the jungle. A human alone could be voluntarily subsumed in the beauty of Nature for pure intellectual stimulation and creative expression.
Man, unless his life be most unfortunately analogous to that of a Mowgli or of a Tarzan, would scarce if ever prefer the jungle as his destination. His rationality cannot, in his quest for intellectual liberation, permit him liberation from life itself at the jaws of a hyper-patient serpentine mess of a creature. Nor is it judicious of him to employ his philosophical argumentation, akin to the emblematic lawyer, with the Shenzis, Banzais, Eds and Simbas of the savannah; all emblematic goons to him.
A meadow, perhaps, best satiates our quest for the most beatific manifestation of Nature, owing not solely to its most exquisite blend of verdure and flowers, but owing also to its metaphorical connotations in regard to that whose importance in human life is surpassed only by air, water and food: language. A meadow with the verdure of prose and the springtime of verse; a verbal meadow, it is well termed.
In a crude sense, the present world must educe pride in a reincarnated Jeremy Bentham, or at least the adherents of his ideals should the former be deemed impossible even figuratively. We have consigned the most elegant invention of man — language — to the sea of utilitarianism. We may not be so imprudent as to regard the preceding centuries as denotative of mass litterateurs, but we would be equally remiss to overlook an immanently ineffable poise in the language of that era.
It is the conquered portion of Nature that is most beauteous to man. Huxley noted with characteristic sapience that Nature could be hostile and inhumanely evil. Man’s conquest thereof is unmitigated evidence of firm artificial control — so much so that he can now incubate entire ecosystems and see them flourish with parental pride. He customizes Nature with tailorly precision, and renders any hostility from it nearly impossible. It is then that he can delight in the aesthetic elegance that it bestows upon his surroundings, be it a manicured lawn or a national park. So is it with language. Immeasurably thoughtful men have written copiously on an impossible assortment of topics, with the most evocative of words. This profusion of verbal pulchritude would be infinitely delightsome to the student of literature and infinitely intimidating to the layperson. Thus, there are periodic attempts to unriddle the intricate engineering of what is purple prose to this teeming majority of laypersons, and use sentences of strictly utilitarian construction.
Nonetheless, we would appreciate that there is little merit in a material conception of a meadow. One must, so as to perennially delight in its beauty, humbly tread its verdure, sans the desire to control. Nature, rinsed in joyful rains and nutrimental sunshine, ought to be permitted to flourish autonomously. External intervention is apt to vitiate its incipient beauty. Not all Nature could possibly be conquered by man; not unless his imprudence causes the unrestrained proliferation of his species and renders this earthly sphere woefully sparse for subsistence. Well, in that event, it imperils the very survival of humanity. Thus, preservation of Nature and its equilibrium with the exigencies of modernity is absolutely must. So is it with language. Indeed, the simplification of verbal elegance is far more subjective a matter than customization of Nature, but we could unpolemically deem language far closer to a meadow, that must necessarily be autonomous, than to such other portions of Nature that could be conquered by man. For simplification of language is a primrose path to the vitiation of its very being. Language ought not to possess solely a utilitarian purpose, in which case it is necessarily confined to robotic communication and an Orwellianesque restriction of free thought. It ought to be permitted to grow and recurrently undergo the process of semantic entanglement, until it can finally blend coherence with elegance. Only such refined language could serve to occasionally stimulate the creative parts of the mind; a most consequential thing in the present age of myriad distractions.
With the progressive advancement of psycholinguistics, it is hoped that we would be able to expound voluminously on semantics and its appeal to the human brain. It suffices to conclude at present that language, as an awe-inspiring manifestation of human dexterity, ought not to be oversimplified, and that verbal intelligence ought to be cultivated.
