Mark​​​​ Canada, Ph.D.​

Frederick Douglass was a master prose stylist. I could have quoted a more lyrical or powerful line from his masterpiece, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, but I chose this one, which illustrates what is, for me, the most fascinating aspect of his argument against slavery in the book. Douglass has just recounted an incident in which an enslaved man has been asked if Colonel Lloyd treated him well. Not knowing who this was asking him the question, he answered that Lloyd did not treat him well. The inquisitor was Lloyd himself, and weeks later the man paid the "penalty." Douglass explains, "The poor man was then informed by his overseer that, for having found fault with his master, he was now to be sold to a Georgia trader. He was immediately chained and handcuffed; and thus, without a moment's warning, he was snatched away, and forever sundered, from his family and friends, by a hand more unrelenting than death." By framing the incident as a "penalty of telling the truth," Douglass illuminates a troubling irony in a region where slavery is legal: telling the truth, widely regarded as a moral act--the "right thing to do"--incurs a horrible fate. Slavery, in short, is a twisted system, one that inverts basic morality. This is, I think, a powerful argument for most people, since basic moral principles are typically widely accepted and respected. A system that not only ignores, but corrupts these principles would seem to be wrong on its face.

Another one of Emerson's lines on consistency, a somewhat pithier one, is more famous than this one. "A foolish consistency," he wrote in this same essay, "is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Whereas that other sentence stands a kind of thesis--a bold challenge, in fact--this one contains a fascinating, penetrating, and compelling elaboration. Emerson begins with a clause advancing his argument about the forces working against self-trust, something he advocates in this essay. (Remember, the title of the essay is "Self-Reliance.")  He contends that consistency--specifically "a reverence for our past act or word"--takes us away from a trust of our individual thoughts. The elaboration comes in the form of the two-part subordinate clause that follows: "because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them." In other words, the people we know--friends, colleagues, loved ones--develop a sense of our identity by observing what we say and do. That's understandable. Emerson, however, believed that there was something invaluable, even divine in individual thought. Ignoring or dismissing this internal inspiration simply to conform to others' sense of our identity was worse than counterproductive (and literally counterintuitive). It was, in Emerson's theology, sacrilegious. My favorite part of this sentence is the final clause: "we are loath to disappoint them." Following the lengthy clause preceding it--"the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts"--it has the punch of a short clause, sounding like an epigram, but ultimately it amounts to an anticlimax. After all this buildup, the final statement is just plain silly: we dismiss our thought because we do not wish to let down people expecting us to conform to a mold we have created for ourselves. It's a ridiculous thing to do, and it appears all the more nakedly ludicrous when set here in a place where we unconsciously expect a crowning truth.

There is no greater prose stylist among American authors than Mark Twain. That's high praise, since those other American authors include Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Truman Capote. Twain's style was distinctive--lyrical and erudite, yet colloquial and playful. A single sentence does not do him justice, but this one provides a glimpse of his brilliance. It comes not from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his most famous novel, but from Life on the Mississippi, a work of nonfiction about, among other things, his experience learning to be a steamboat pilot. In this sentence from an early chapter, Twain is referring to a boy from his town, one who had managed to secure a job on a steamboat while Twain himself--or Samuel Clemens, as he was then known--had not scratched his own itch. After building, building, building as he refers to his own "desire to be a steamboatman" and then recounts this boy's departure and reappearance as a "striker" on a boat, Twain explains, with a delightfully colloquial and vivid metaphor, "This thing shook the bottom out of all my Sunday-school teachings." Finally, he sticks the landing with the sentence above. Part of its magic is its symmetry. The sentence actually consists of two balanced compound sentences (one on each side of the semicolon), and each of these sentences consists of two balanced independent clauses (although the second clause in each is elliptical, so we don't actually see the predicating verb. There is more, though. In the first half of the sentence, the first clause is a little top-heavy; the predicate sprawls a bit with the five-syllable adverb "notoriously" building up to the similarly ending subject complement "worldly." This comparatively lengthy first part of the sentence makes the second part of the sentence feel especially punchy, especially since it ends on a stressed syllable: "just the reVERSE." The second sentence is a little different, though also consisting of two clauses. Continuing in the same vein and grammatical pattern, the first part refers to the other boy, this time in positive terms: "exalted to this eminence." The second part echoes the first part of the first sentence, as we have two polysyllabic words ending in the same sounds--"obscurity and misery." If you "hear" this sentence in your head, you may sense a rise in the first part of each sentence, followed by a fall in the second part. Sound complements sense.

Like Thomas Jefferson and other contemporaries in the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin became attracted to Deism, a Christianity-inspired philosophy that recognized Jesus as an important teacher, but not a divine figure. In his autobiography, Franklin wrote about his dabbling with Deism, but at one point shares some of his doubts about it. He explains that both he and some of his acquaintances had not always behaved very responsibly or respectably as Deists, implying that this philosophy was of dubious practical value. Franklin was a highly practical man who tended to measure the merit of something in terms of its practical value--that is, how effective it was in bringing about visible, tangible results, such as the betterment of the human condition. This worldview finds eloquent--and comical--expression in this wonderful line: ""I began to suspect that this doctrine tho it might be true was not very useful." The crowning touch of this line is the subordinate clause "tho it might be true." Truth is a widely accepted criterion for the value of a belief system. In short, we measure the value of a belief largely or entirely on whether it reveals the truth of existence or presents true principles. In this line, Franklin does not explicitly dismiss truth as a criterion, but he elevates practical value. It's a bold statement. Imagine someone saying such a thing about a commonly accepted modern religion such as Christianity or Buddhism. It might strike some as sacrilegious. In the case of Franklin's line, though, it's also so brazen and unorthodox as to be funny. This belief system, he essentially says, may in fact accurately reflect the nature of existence, but it's failing me in this world, so . . . thanks for nothing.