I admit, until that moment, the ecclesiastical calendar had been the furthest thing from my mind. I knew that C. had gone to church, obviously, but I hadn’t for a moment stopped to think about why. Now, looking at her, I suddenly felt alarmed: however secular of a Jew I may be, I would not have proposed marriage on Yom Kippur. She, meanwhile, hadn’t noticed anything unusual about me or about the evening—and why would she? I had simply showered after working on the floors, as she had done, and made us dinner, as I often do. We sat down to break her Lenten fast, and for the second time in a month I found myself wondering over a bowl of soup if I should put off asking her to marry me. Meanwhile, C. asked about the flooring and talked about her evening, and then told me a story about another Ash Wednesday service some years back, one that she herself had helped officiate: after the sermon, a little girl had come up to the altar with her mother, belatedly grasped the point of the occasion, and, just as C. bent to make the mark of the cross on her forehead, there in the solemn hush of the sanctuary, hollered at the top of her tiny lungs, “I don’t want to die!”
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The candle flame bent double, then straightened up again. The world moves with our laughter, with our breath, with our grief, just not very much. The firelight fell on C. as in a Flemish painting, setting her loveliness against the dark. I had in my pocket a wedding ring that six months earlier had been on my father’s hand. I did not want to die, either. I especially did not want to die without telling C. that I loved her, that I would always love her, that I wanted to marry her. I did not want to die without being married to her, for forty-nine or seventy-nine or preferably a thousand and ninety-nine years. Deathbeds, sickrooms, a smudge of ashes on her brow: I would wait forever, I realized, if I waited until suffering and sorrow were nowhere to be found. We had finished eating; I led her into the living room and sat her down beside me on the couch.
* * *
—
Of the million-some words in the English language, “and” is the third most common—three times as common as “I,” four times as common as “you,” trailing behind only “the” and the combined conjugations of the verb “to be.” If you have spoken more than three or four sentences today, you have almost certainly used it; if you have gotten this far in this book, you have read it nearly two thousand times.
But if “and” is among the most everyday of words, it is also, in an understated way, one of the most existentially provocative. The world as described by other conjunctions seems to obey a set of specific, discernible rules: things precede each other or follow each other, preclude each other or cause each other. But the world as described by “and” is just an endless disorganized list. My mother and my father, C. and me, grief and love, life and death, yaks and harmonicas, playwrights and hay bales and polynomial equations, hurricanes and sweatshops and smallpox and Pop-Tarts, DNA and “Oh, Danny Boy” and Addis Ababa and the rings of Saturn and Zoroastrianism and clinical depression and Flanders Fields and Billie Holiday and the eight hundred and forty indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea—already we are confronting a chaotic abundance, and we have enumerated less than a paragraph’s worth of the countless andable things of the universe.
Like finding something or losing something, this quality of endless conjunction has the effect of making the world seem extraordinarily large and our own place in it vanishingly small. It also mimics a kind of imaginary primeval state of knowledge, as if everything in existence has been tossed down haphazardly in front us, leaving us to determine what relationships, if any, govern it all. One possible answer to that question was proposed by Elizabeth Bishop, who, in addition to her interest in losing things, was interested in the scale of the world and the problem of how to make sense of its wildly different parts. In “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” she moves from describing images in a Bible to describing images of the world as she journeys through it. Unlike the contents of the book, the contents of real life—in this case, a corpse, a jukebox, some goats, a British duchess, young Moroccan prostitutes—resist being brought into any kind of concordance. They are bound together only by the coincidence of existing at the same time, and by the fact of a traveler being there to witness them. That is Bishop’s provocative suggestion: that no other, more orderly relationship exists among all the disparate stuff around us. Instead, life is made up of countless unrelated fragments, “Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’?”
As it happens, there is a word for things that are “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’?” That grammatical construction is known as polysyndeton, meaning “many bindings.” It shows up frequently in the Old Testament—for instance, when God calls down a drought upon Jerusalem: “upon the land, and upon the mountains, and upon the corn, and upon the new wine, and upon the oil, and upon that which the ground bringeth forth, and upon men, and upon cattle, and upon all the labour of the hands.” As you’ll see if you read that example out loud, polysyndeton is an effective rhetorical device in part because of the long, slow, wave-form shape it gives to sentences. The effect is sometimes incantatory and sometimes ecstatic; in either of two directions, it conjures a sense of awe. Not by accident is there so much polysyndeton in the Bible.
And not by accident is the Bible the foil to the world in Bishop’s poem. To the question of what binds together all of the stuff around us, it offers the opposite answer: a divinely ordained plan, with each element occupying its right and necessary place. Between these two poles—that nothing is meaningfully connected; that everything is meaningfully connected—lie plenty of other ways to make sense of existence. It is perfectly possible to believe in a creator God while holding that, outside of certain basic laws of nature, much of what appears to be deliberately connected is merely thrown together by chance. And it is perfectly possible to not believe in God at all, yet still feel that there are meaningful relations all around us—that everyone and everything is here for a reason, and that, in deep and important ways, we are all connected.
I myself hold this last belief: like a beautiful literary passage, we have many bindings. The ones that interest me most, however, are not necessarily intrinsic. They are created or inferred—the product, as it were, of Bishop’s watchful traveler. Whatever you think about the supra-human organization of the cosmos, we ourselves organize it all the time, and the ability to do so is one of the most distinctive features of the human mind. It is why we can look at a night sky full of stars and see a bear and a cross and a warrior with his sword, and it is why we can recognize the influence of Oedipus Rex on Hamlet, and it is why we know that ostriches are distantly related to dinosaurs. More generally, it is how we wrest order from confusion, transforming life’s boundless list into something more like a story, full of structure, information, and meaning. Granted, this ability is not without drawbacks; it is also why we leap to conclusions and why we are so susceptible to conspiracy theories. Still, it is almost impossible to overstate how emotionally, ethically, and intellectually impaired we would be if we could not perceive connections among seemingly dissimilar things.