Here’s my latest imitation and explanation.  I use the italicized part of my explanation to advocate for imitation as a means of preparing ourselves for the AP Language and Composition exam’s argument and synthesis essay prompts.

My post:

It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving.  There had been jollity and peace and goodness.  The arriving (at the beginning of August) had been so big a business in itself, at the railway station the farm wagon drawn up, the first smell of the pine-laden air, the first glimpse of the smiling farmer, and the great importance of the trunks and your father’s enormous authority in such matters, and the feel of the wagon under you for the long ten-mile haul, and at the top of the last long hill catching the first view of the lake after eleven months of not seeing this cherished body of water. The shouts and cries of the other campers when they saw you, and the trunks to be unpacked, to give up their rich burden. (Arriving was less exciting nowadays, when you sneaked up in your car and parked it under a tree near the camp and took out the bags and in five minutes it was all over, no fuss, not loud wonderful fuss about trunks.)

– E. B. White, from his essay “Once More to the Lake”

At the far end of the lineup, as if it were anchoring a rainbow, stood the red Nano. Red always stands out, but this Nano stood out among the other six colors on the web page in another respect: it was engraved with “(Product) Red.” If I bought the red one over the more sensible silver one six colors down, Apple would give half of the sale’s profits to a fund to fight AIDS in Africa.

I first learned about charity in the bosom of the church.  “Remember the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, how he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” Each Sunday, as Rev. Burke, an ex-Army chaplain who was there on D-Day, intoned those words, my mother reached a white glove into her purse and pressed a silver dime against the palms of each of her three children.  I was the oldest.  I liked dimes: bright, diminutive, and branded with the bust of a pretty lady, or at least of an angel. I remember the slightly metallic smell mixing with the moisture inside the fist I made to protect it.  But my attachment to riches took as long as it takes to repeat after Jesus, “Freely you have received, freely give.” I plunked my dime in a golden plate, the plate was passed to an elderly usher, and the usher, joined down the long, red-carpeted aisle in a kind of pecuniary confluence with three other men, merged his plate with theirs into the hands of a teenaged acolyte.  I felt a certain regret mixed with a strange sensation of freedom as Rev. Burke collected the plates, including my dime, from the acolyte, who had turned from us in a swoosh of his cassock, long and red.

I thought about those early Sundays as I struggled with the red Nano’s implicit argument: pick me, and you’ll help fight AIDS in Africa!  You’ll be charitable! But what would I have given up? The silver and red Nanos cost the same.  Apple wasn’t training me, as my mother had, by letting a coin sweat in my hand long enough for “a dime” to become “my dime.”  Instead, (Product) Red felt more like a nicotine patch against my arm, something to wean me from the charity I had contracted under the aegis of the Episcopal Church long ago.

My comment:

Last class we reflected on our weaknesses as timed essayists.  Of the three common weaknesses the AP readers described, perhaps a plurality of our community picked writing “an exam answer” instead of “a full essay.” But weaving forty minutes into a good article of writing is a tough skill for all of us, even those of us who because of a greater exigency picked “evidence” or “syntax” instead of “full essay.” We all have only forty minutes to write an essay’s rough draft.  How can it be good?  Given the time constraint and the need to convey a great deal of information, how can it be anything other than what it is – an “exam answer”?

Our argument essays, and to some extent our synthesis essays, can take on some of the style of the master essayists we’ve been reading this year.  One way to write something closer to an enjoyable essay is to study, and even to imitate, enjoyable essays others have written.  The skills we’re developing from our reading and writing this year, along with the freedom of knowing that style is just as important as substance, will be with us for those brief forty minutes in May.  Through practice, most of the good decisions you’ll make in your writing this May will be instinctive – instinctive to you then as putting a period at the end of a sentence is to you now.

So in this imitation piece, I wanted to address the same essay prompt blocks 3 and 4 responded to, and I wanted to deliberately do it in something like the style of E. B. White, a famous essayist we’ll read later this year.  I can’t plaster “WWEBD?” on my mind’s back bumper when I write my argument essay this May, but maybe my practice in writing like White will help me internalize some of his approach and (hopefully) some of his wonderful pacing and syntax.

Here’s the prompt, in pertinent part: “In a well-written essay, develop a position on the ethics of offering incentives for charitable acts.”

I don’t write an entire essay here, but I write an essay’s opening, and the opening may be enough to suggest a framework for the other information I’d include to respond to the prompt.

In the rest of this comment, I describe how my piece employs some of the literary, rhetorical, and compositional techniques in White’s essay “Once More to the Lake.”

I want to start with a periodic sentence as White does in the paragraph I quote.  These right-branch sentences always add drama. (White’s tone can be so placid that he needs his syntax to provide the drama his pacing never creates.) I also like the nuclear emphasis White uses in that sentence before each piece of punctuation: “ME,” “THIS,” and “SAVing.” (I used “LINEup,” “RAINbow,” and “NAno.”)

I also borrow the entire golden-past-versus-plastic-present theme White gets across in this paragraph. White’s comparison becomes confrontational at the end, even though he puts it in parenthesis.  I compare Apple’s approach to charity unfavorably with the Episcopal Church’s of my youth, just as White compares his arrival at camp in the present with his arrivals there in his youth.

We both use longer cumulative sentences with some parallel structure to get across the process of travel.  He:

The arriving (at the beginning of August) had been so big a business in itself, at the railway station the farm wagon drawn up, the first smell of the pine-laden air, the first glimpse of the smiling farmer, and the great importance of the trunks and your father’s enormous authority in such matters, and the feel of the wagon under you for the long ten-mile haul, and at the top of the last long hill catching the first view of the lake after eleven months of not seeing this cherished body of water.

And I:

I plunked my dime in a golden plate, the plate was passed to an elderly usher, and the usher, joined down the aisle with three other men, merged his plate with theirs into the hands of a teenaged acolyte.

(He uses more phrases – nouns followed by prepositional phrases, and I use more independent clauses.  But hey.)

White’s chief modes of rhetoric in this paragraph are both description and process analysis, and I tried to achieve that in my piece.  On the descriptive end, he describes a childhood smell (the “pine-laden air”), and I do, too (the sweaty dime). On the process end, he describes the annual arrival at camp, and I describe the weekly collection of offerings.

Both White and I use comparison, description, and process analysis to achieve a greater end.  I intend to argue that the ethics of charity should include sacrifice.  We’ll see what White intended later this year when we read his essay! But you can see from this single paragraph from White’s essay that he feels we lose something sometimes when we make things easier, which would be a big part of my essay’s argument, too, were I to write the entire essay.

Harnessing your intuition can help you see things so-called experts overlook. Years ago I remembered that the Pittsburgh Steelers, who had just beaten the Dallas Cowboys in a Super Bowl, had been the looser team along the sidelines before the game’s kickoff, jumping and cavorting like idiots.  I made a point of looking for the looser team before the following year’s Super Bowl kickoff, and I was rewarded by picking the game’s winner.  I have since applied my “Loose-ometer” on at least twelve occasions, and it has always pointed to the Super Bowl winner, including a couple of notable underdogs.

You must befriend your sixth sense and slowly learn from experience how it whispers to you. It’s all Malcolm Gladwell stuff.  Read Blink and rediscover your intuition for fun and profit.

My final example of intuitive method may become more profitable than betting on Super Bowls. I stumbled on it two years ago after helping Bethany pick colleges. I had wasted a lot of time reading through several thick college guides from U.S. News, College Board, and the like.  Bethany finally settled on a great school, and one that I later realized I could have picked for her by going with my first impression gained from simply speaking the college’s name.

Now I’m putting this intuitive system to use by helping several teens of my relation pick colleges during their junior and senior years. I simply ask them to say the college’s name over and over and to describe the impression it gives. At our extended family’s annual beach trip last summer, I gargled the names of six schools a relation had chosen and urged her to give her highest consideration to Bucknell.  I knew (and still know) nothing about Bucknell, but the name conjures a buck – I see large antlers – and the sound of a knell.  Strong imagery. The letter k – the word’s center, assertive in buck but silent and reserved in knell – seems to endow Bucknell with both yin and yang and to spin the word on the k’s axis into a kind of spiritually enlightened chocolate-and-vanilla swirl.  (Armed with these insights, who would waste time reading about the colleges’ more prosaic endowments described in those fat, overweening guides, or listening to those same colleges’ own self-serving spin?)

And Bucknell’s physiognomy? (I believe our words possess us, and that a word’s pneuma animates our faces as we speak it.) If you say Bucknell slowly, repeatedly, your mouth begins to assert itself and your entire face feels fierce: the first syllable fires out your lips with an air blast, and then the second syllable thrusts out your jaw as your mouth widens slowly, menacingly.  Say it three times: you’ll lower your antlers and charge.

I mean, Bucknell’s so Anglo-Saxon that you want to chase it with “Excuse my French.”

Bucknell since fell by the wayside, alas – I may have discounted the knell connotation in my enthusiasm – but I received some good news today about my relation’s prospects concerning a college that wasn’t in our sights last summer. I responded with this email:

Dear C___: Congratulations! Worcester sounds even better than Bucknell, you know.  Worcester is like Leicester and forecastle – words only the British know how to pronounce, words that remain mysterious, beguiling, and befuddling to your country-bumpkin American more used to rorcesters. Shibboleths, in fact, of culture and high standing.  You can graduate from there and roll your eyes when people mispronounce it. Best of all, I’m not paying the tuition.  Go there!

She’ll probably also get into a few public schools with which I’m more familiar – schools with excellent reputations and low, in-state tuitions but also cursed with ominously pedestrian names.  I hope to steer her away from these, and I trust her parents will see fit to remunerate me when the financial spigot twists open full bore this fall. Affirmation along those lines would encourage me to share my intuitive gift as a consultant to anxious high school upperclassmen and their families outside of my limited sphere.

But what of this: the dream expresses some desire for both the arts and God: a struggle in my womb that I have touched on many times. And even though it seems to friends a false dilemma now (a misconception, if you will), the day will come, I fear, when I must choose between the two. But then I also hear the smallest voice suggesting that the fight itself will be enough to bond my Jacob and his nightly angel.

While he was in Jerusalem for Passover many put their trust in him when they saw the signs that he performed. But Jesus for his part would not trust himself to them. He knew them all, and had no need of evidence from others about anyone, for he himself could tell what was in people. (John 2:23 – 25, REB)

The many needed evidence; Jesus didn’t.  The many put their trust in Jesus, but Jesus would not trust himself to them.

John’s Jesus’ mission is an introvert’s outreach, roughly speaking. Field note speaking.

Each stop in Jesus’ campaign so far has sorted people in unexpected ways: by what one knew (Nathanael and the reader), by how one understood an ambiguity (the Jews and disciples), by what room one was in (the wedding). The wedding in Cana alone involves four circles of intimacy: the master of the feast who celebrates Jesus’ miracle without knowing that a miracle has occurred, the servants who know of the miracle but not of Jesus’ conversation with his mother, and his mother, whose sketchy colloquy with Jesus demonstrates she knows all.  I am in a fourth circle, closer to the center than the master of the feast and the servants but less intimate than Mary since the text’s first read shuts me out. I inhabit an uneasy ring between the inner and outer rings.

And now, at the end of chapter 2, this policy of concealment is revealed. When Jesus is direct in the other gospels, it’s often only by a disciple’s request. The requesting disciple also risked a reproof for his lack of understanding. Likewise this text of John’s, which describes itself as testimony, feels most reluctant when that testimony is clear. And what does that say about me, the reader?

John 2 feels like the melismatic high Middle Ages resolving into the vocal articulation of the Renaissance.  It feels like the isorhythmic novels of Sterne and Fielding resolving into the thick-plotted Victorian novel.  It feels like a concession — something that must be said to move on.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

The Jews challenged Jesus: ‘What sign can you show to justify your action?’

‘Destroy this temple,’ Jesus replied, ‘and in three days I will raise it up again.’

The Jews said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple. Are you going to raise it up again in three days?’

But the temple he was speaking of was his body.

After his resurrection his disciples recalled what he had said, and they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. (John 2:18 – 22, REB)

The discourse turns on a misapprehension.  What are we to understand about the Jews who misunderstand Jesus’ reference to “this temple”?  What are we to understand about Jesus who doesn’t clear up the ambiguity?  About the disciples and what they might have understood of the interaction before Jesus’ death and resurrection? Why does the text feel free to jump briefly ahead to a time after Jesus’ resurrection? Why did the disciples’ understanding, apparently three years in coming, have such a strong effect on them then?  Is the book itself — is community itself — in part a kind of collective memory? And so on.

Acclimated by my own conjectures and misapprehension through Jesus’ interactions with Nathanael and then with his mother, I can sympathize with the Jews here.  That sympathy feels uncomfortable.

John’s revelations are evanescent.  I feel as if I’m asked to skate on ice always forming just ahead of me and melting just where I lift my back foot.

How different is a similar story in Matthew:

At this some of the scribes and the Pharisees said, ‘Teacher, we would like you to show us a sign.’  He answered: ‘It is a wicked, godless generation that asks for a sign, and the only sign that will be given it is the sign of the prophet Jonah.  Just as Jonah was in the sea monster’s belly for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the bowels of the earth. (Matthew 12:38 – 40, REB)

As he does in John, Jesus responds here to a request for a sign with a veiled reference to his death and resurrection.  Matthew likes to show how Jesus fulfills scripture readers may not otherwise realize is prophetic of anything, and John likes to do this as well. (At the end of his conversation with Nathanael, for instance, Jesus tells him he will see “angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man” — a clear suggestion that Jesus is the ladder from earth to heaven in Jacob’s famous dream.) But Matthew houses none of the quick, playful complication among Jesus, the Jews, and the disciples that John dwells in.  Nothing of the never said.

In the world of John’s gospel, insight is a precious and fleeting gift, and misunderstandings and unclear referents are quick ways to size up who gets it and who doesn’t. John’s brief anecdotes play above a plainchant of legal references (testimony, witness) that adds a kind of tension to the anecdotes’ unclear referents.  John is a mesmerizing and disturbing organum.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

Evangelicals put such emphasis on knowing the Lord.  Yet

No longer need they teach one another, neighbour or brother, to know the Lord; all of them, high and low alike, will know me, says the Lord, for I shall forgive their wrongdoing, and their sin I shall call to mind no more.  (Jeremiah 31:34, REB)

The Bible seems to put a bigger emphasis on God seeing or knowing us:

O LORD, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, And are intimately acquainted with all my ways. (Psalm 139:1-3, NNAS)

When the day comes, many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, drive out demons in your name, and in your name perform many miracles?” Then I will tell them plainly, “I never knew you. Out of my sight; your deeds are evil!” (Matthew 7:22-23 – REB)

But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God… (Galatians 4:9 – NNAS)

Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:12 – KJV)

If anyone fancies that he has some kind of knowledge, he does not yet know in the true sense of knowing. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God. (1 Corinthians 8:3 – REB)

Maybe, like Nathanael, I must be seen so I can see or even start to want to see. Perhaps I must be known so I can know.

1. Mary (Jesus’ mother) and John (Jesus’ disciple and the gospel’s author) make only brief appearances in John’s gospel.
2. When Mary and John do appear, they seem quite intimate with Jesus.  Mary knows Jesus is about to perform a miracle though he has never done so before and vehemently denies he will now.  John leans on Jesus’ breast at the last supper and hears Jesus say things that others there miss.
3. Neither Mary nor John is named in John’s gospel.  Mary is only “Jesus’ mother.” John is only “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” John’s and Mary’s names are used only for others. The only John in John is John the Baptist.  John never even bothers to say “John the Baptist” or “John Baptist” to distinguish him from himself as the other gospels do.  In fact, the word “Baptist” isn’t found in John at all.  And the Marys in John are always Mary Magdala, Mary wife of Clopas, Mary of Mary and Martha, etc. Never Mother Mary.
4. Hanging on the cross, Jesus puts Mary and John together: “Seeing his mother, with the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, Jesus said to her, ‘Mother, there is your son’;  and to the disciple, ‘There is your mother’; and from that moment the disciple took her into his home.” (John 19:26 – 27, REB)

Just saying.  She could have helped him write it.