Alan Jacobs

You could say ‘the face of the deep’ was found or chosen or selected by the 1611 translators, but you can’t say it was theirs. And, in that respect, the coinage joins 'let there be light’, 'am I my brother’s keeper?’, 'be fruitful and multiply’, 'pillar of salt’, 'bald as a coot’, 'let my people go’, 'by the skin of my teeth’, 'tender mercies’, 'the spirit is willing’, 'a man after his own heart’, 'vanity of vanities’, 'sign of the times’, 'wages of sin’, 'all things to all men’, 'eat, drink and be merry’, 'fight the good fight’, 'through a glass darkly’, 'grave, where is thy victory?’ and 'the powers that be’ among phrases that appear in English versions of the Bible published long before the King James translators took up their pens.

Celebrants of this year’s anniversary have enjoyed pointing out the ironies of the translation: that it was commissioned to mollify the losing faction at a religious conference; that far from 'inventing the language’, it was written in archaic prose; and – most surprising of all – that it was made not by an individual genius but by six largely anonymous committees. But its authorship is much broader than the 53 clerics and one lay scholar who were selected to do James I’s bidding in 1604. Most of the memorable Biblical phrases listed above were coined not in the hallowed cloisters of Oxford colleges or in the sepulchral calm of the Jerusalem Chamber but on the run. Five of the seven major English Bibles of the 16th century were produced in exile; two of their makers died at the stake. Each new Bible was the manifesto of a faction in the religious wars that revolutionised Tudor England, each subsequent Bible a revision and many a riposte. The full, 80-year-plus history of the English Bible is the story of the English reformation; it is spattered with blood and scorched with fire.

But just how many English idioms come from the KJB? When I was writing Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, I asked people how many they thought there were, and received answers ranging from a hundred to a thousand. It was time to do a proper count. So I read the whole work, looking out for any phrase that I felt had come to be a part of modern English.

I made two discoveries. First, there are not as many as some people think: I found 257. And second, most of the idioms don’t originate in the King James version at all. Rather, they are to be found in Tyndale’s translation nearly a century earlier, or one of the other major versions of the 16th century. The relatively small total shouldn’t suprise us. The aim of the KJB translators, as they say in their preface, was not to make a new translation “but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principall good one”. They had little choice in the matter, as the guidelines for their work, which had been approved by the king, required them to use the Bishops’ Bible as their first model, making as few alterations as possible; and, when this was found wanting, they could refer to earlier versions. Unlike Shakespeare, they were not great linguistic innovators.

So we mustn’t exaggerate. It’s true to say, as several commentators do, that no other literary source has matched the KJB for the number of influential idioms it contains; but it isn’t true to say that it originated all of them. Rather, what it did was popularise them, so much so that it’s now impossible to find an area of contemporary expression that doesn’t from time to time use them, either literally or playfully.

Scrapping the King James version, in the well-meaning way of the well-educated classes, had a number of effects, the most decisive and the most disastrous of which was to destroy for ever an ordinary, everyday connection with 400 years of the English language. In my northern mill town, many working men studied Shakespeare at the Mechanics’ Institute or the Workers’ Extension lectures. No one thought the language difficult because it is the language of the King James, and we had grown up with that. Shakespeare, like the Bible, was written to be heard; like Shakespeare, the Bible is theatre.

King James does not use sub-clauses or dependent clauses; it is a direct English, and one you can still hear, even now, in northern speech, the kind we celebrate in Alan Bennett. The language is grammatically uncluttered, but rich in vocabulary and image.

There is a difference between “obscure” and “difficult”. I accept that, by now, the King James version seems more difficult than it is, but its rewards are greater than its difficulty.

The Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Center efficiently dispels the ‘genius’ status awarded to the writer, not because his writing isn’t singularly and bewilderingly excellent (it is, even in draft form), but because it presents him as a human being, one of us. Declarations that Wallace is in some other 'time-space continuum’ are unhelpful because he worked so hard to depict what it means to be a human being in this world, in an age lacking sincerity, but saturated with ironic posturing. With The Pale King, Wallace’s long awaited posthumous novel approaching its release date, we should perhaps brace ourselves for another storm of this type of commentary. But thinking of Wallace as 'Dave’, the writer who slogged through research (the archive reveals he even took tedious classes in tax law to help with The Pale King), sweated each sentence to achieve perfect prose, and strove to depict our own world with unflinching emotional honesty, perhaps makes the work all the more astonishing.

mwfrost:

In Memoriam

Are attention spans deteriorating?  Forty years ago, the length of Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and The Pity (at 4 hours 11 minutes) or Andy Warhol’s Empire (6 hours 36 minutes) was a sign of extreme seriousness. Today, popular entertainments are vastly longer. J. M. Straczynski’s Babylon 5 was conceived as a single story told in more than 100 hours of film. Joss Whedon’s Buffy, The Vampire Slayer is a coming of age story meant to be viewed over a period of seven years. Harry Potter comes in seven volumes, none of them short, and when the children have finished those, they enjoy Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,  J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and the 20 volumes of Patrick O'Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin stories. If our attention span grows short, one wonders where those mythic Victorians found time get anything done.

I would add a few more points about the difference between possibilism and agnosticism. We have to acknowledge that both Possibilians and Agnostics belong the church of I Don’t Know. Both positions support I-don’t-knowism. And I-don’t-knowism is the founding beatitude of science. But here’s how they are different:

Agnostics end with the lack of an answer.
Possibilians begin with the lack of an answer.

Agnostics say, we can’t decide between this and that.
Possibilians say, there are other choices than this or that.

Agnostics say, I Don’t Know, it’s impossible to answer that question.
Possibilians say, I Don’t Know, there must be better questions.

Both start in humility, but agnosticism is bounded by our great ignorance, while possibilism is unbounded by our limited knowledge.

I don’t subscribe to the ‘Google is making us dumber’ position. I think Google is allowing us to be differently smart. I also refuse to bracket off my students as some exotic tribe that behaves and reacts differently than I do or my mother does. We are all in this crazy environment together. The challenges we share are much more important and interesting than the differences we might demonstrate across age groups. So yeah, Google is my primary research tool. It’s also my mother’s. Collectively, our dependence on Google is not a problem because it allegedly weakens our faculties. It’s a problem because Google bakes biases into its algorithms. And we fail to recognize that fact. Most of the time, we can’t even discern what they are. Most of the recent changes in Google’s search algorithms make Google much better for shopping and much worse for learning. That could make us collectively dumber, but not individually. That’s why we need a fresh approach to how we manage our information ecosystem. The same service cannot serve wisdom and wealth equally well.

But I come here, and follow the Christian monastic day laid out like a garden plot by Benedict at the close of the Roman era. I am Western; I like my silence sung.

In any case, the day itself is silent. The only words are the chanted ones in the chapel, unless I call home. My thin voice sounds odd, insubstantial. My husband carefully recites all the messages from my office answering machine. I ask if he’s OK. He is. You OK? I tell him I am. I love you. Me too — I love you. Touching base. The telephone receiver clicks back into its cradle, and the mirage of news and endearments melts. It doesn’t disappear exactly — I leave the telephone room, a little booth by the monastery bookstore, smiling, his voice still in my ear. It’s just that conversation has become a bare tissue of meaning, a funny human foible, but not something to take seriously for once. The mid-day bell is ringing, and there is something I’m trying to remember.

That’s wrong. I am not trying “to remember” something. I want to get this right, this odd experience of praying all day. More like this: I am being remembered. Being remembered into a memory — beyond historic to the inchoate, still intense trace of feeling that first laid down this pattern. It is a memory which puts all personal memory in the shade, and with it, all other language. In my experience, it is unique, this sensation of being drawn out of language by language which the Divine Office occasions. Praying, chanting the Psalms, draws me out of whatever I might be thinking or remembering (for so much thinking is remembering, revisiting, rehearsing). I am launched by the Psalms into a memory to which I belong but which is not mine. I don’t possess it; it possesses me. Possession understood not as ownership, but as embrace. The embrace of habitation. Hermitage of the word.

— Patricia Hampl

If it was impossible to replace politics with righteous anger in 1944, it is surely all the more impossible in 2011. In fact, when Hessel tries to make “get angry” into a political platform, the results range from incoherent to sinister. For the attractive thing about anger is also the dangerous thing about it: It turns consensus, the basis of democratic politics, into a vice. All of France’s problems today, Hessel explains, can be attributed to the rich: “the power of money … has never been so large, insolent, and egotistical, with its servants even in the highest spheres of the State.” These are the same kinds of malefactors, he says, who were responsible for the defeat of 1940 and the rise of Vichy: “When I try to understand the origins of fascism, why were invaded by it and by Vichy, I tell myself that the rich, with their egotism, were terribly afraid of the Bolshevik Revolution.”

It follows from this equation that any attempt to cut back the French welfare state, such as Nicholas Sarkozy has been making with limited success, is the moral equivalent of Vichy. One of Hessel’s examples of the virtuous indignation he is calling for is the French teachers’ strike in 2008: The teachers who rebelled against proposed budget cuts “decided that these reforms departed too far from the ideal of the republican school, were too much at the service of a society of money.” Yet Hessel does not say anything at all about the content of the reform, which was extremely moderate—to shed 8,000 teaching jobs through attrition, by not replacing 50 percent of retiring teachers. Nor does he say anything about the motivation for it—to balance the French budget in line with European Union requirements, and to respond to falling class sizes. In other words, Hessel’s indignation does not allow for consideration of the trade-offs involved in every ordinary political decision.