“And” does none of these things. It is a connection made of nothing but connection; two things, three things, ten things coexist in a sentence, but grammar is mute on the subject of what, other than that single word, might bind them. This no-strings-attached combinatory power makes it a particularly easy conjunction to master: of all the ways we can put the world together, “and” is the most fundamental, the first and simplest knot we learn to tie. Young children, who may not grasp the specific relationships implied by other conjunctions, are fluent and profligate users of this one. From the plot of Frozen to the first day of kindergarten, life as little kids narrate it is just one long string of “and then—and then—and then.”
This apparent simplicity makes “and” an easy word to overlook, a fact that William James pauses to note in a strange and wonderful passage in The Principles of Psychology. In the middle of writing about the stream of consciousness, which was his term for the constant flow of thoughts in the mind, he suddenly mixes his metaphors, shifting from an image of thought as a river to an image of thought as a bird. Like birds, he observes, our thoughts are sometimes in flight and sometimes perching, but we only ever observe them when they’ve alighted somewhere. He calls these perches the “substantive” parts of thought: the nouns and verbs and adjectives, which we fix our minds on when we think about the things we’re thinking. The other, “transitive” parts of thought flit past without our notice. Yet they are what gives language its sense, by establishing its relations, and they are as distinct from one another as “tornado” is from “celebrity” is from “roast beef.” “We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by,” James wrote, “quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.”
What, then, is the feeling of and? Above all, it is a feeling of association, a subtle awareness that two or more things have been brought into relationship. It doesn’t matter whether those things are linked by affinity, animosity, or difference; Cain and Abel are bound together as tightly as Romeo and Juliet, and both are bound as tightly as apples and oranges. It doesn’t even matter if they have no intrinsic link at all, because the effect of joining them with “and” is to create one. Chimpanzees and orangutans and baboons and spider monkeys have an inherent connection. Cabbages and kings did not, until Lewis Carroll put the “and” between them.
That semantic versatility reflects an existential truth. Our chronic condition involves experiencing many things all at once—some of them intrinsically related, some of them compatible, some of them contradictory, and some of them having nothing to do with one another at all, beyond being crowded together in our own awareness. Even if we try, we can hardly ever experience something all by itself, as James pointed out. His fellow psychologists treated “simple sensations”—one sight, one sound, one smell—as the atomic units of thought, which they advised studying in isolation to try to understand the mind as a whole. But “no one ever had a simple sensation by itself,” James objected: we do not experience the feeling of heat separate from sunlight or a stovetop, from awareness of our own bodies, from the sound of waves or of our mother screaming. “Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations,” he wrote, “and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.” His point was that his colleagues had it backward. Far from being the most basic activity of the mind, experiencing something in isolation is an effortful exception to the rule.
We all know this, because we have all tried to experience something in isolation, an exercise that promptly reveals the extent to which our minds are perpetual “and” machines. Even when you are attempting to focus on just one thing, such as the paragraph you are reading, or attempting to focus on nothing, as when meditating or trying to fall asleep, your brain is forever spitting out other things as well: items on your To Do list, anxiety about an upcoming doctor’s appointment, the memory of something embarrassing you said the day before, the itchiness of the mosquito bite on your ankle, the lyrics to “Raised on Robbery.”
And it is not just the background hubbub of the mind that throws the world into constant conjunction. Life, too, is a perpetual “and” machine, reliably delivering us a mixture of things to experience all at once. It is perfectly possible, in the course of any given hour, to be charmed by your nine-year-old and infuriated by your twelve-year-old and worried about an upcoming job interview and also worried about global climate change. This endless clamor sometimes produces difficult juxtapositions, because life, like “and,” is indifferent to what it connects. Maybe your own personal circumstances are the best they’ve ever been but your nation is in crisis; maybe your brand-new baby daughter looks just like her grandmother but that grandmother is suffering from Alzheimer’s and cannot recognize either one of you. Contrasts like these proliferate both around us and within us: you adore your brother but he drives you crazy; you despise your ex-husband but love beyond description the children you wouldn’t have without him. We all have mixed experiences, mixed emotions, mixed motives, even mixed selves. The most cheerful among us is not consistently happy, and the best among us is not consistently good. We are all, as my beloved Lutheran likes to say, simul justus et peccator: at once righteous and sinning.
In everyday life, we seldom fully focus on conjunctions like these, any more than we focus on the word “and.” Yet multiple simultaneous experiences and emotions are so common that by the time we reach adulthood, the very fabric of our life is made of patchwork. We know by then that the world is full of beauty and grandeur and also wretchedness and suffering; we know that people are kind and funny and brilliant and brave and also petty and irritating and horrifically cruel. In short, we know that, as Philip Roth once put it, “Life is and.” He meant that we do not live, for the most part, in a world of either/or. We live with both at once, with many things at once—everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.
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