‘I used to think I would grow up to be a person whose reasoning was deep, instead I became a kind of brush.’
Anne Carson, “Reticent Sonnet,” from “Float” (Knopf, 2016)
Never underestimate a comma. A comma can do anything. It can divvy up your most complex thoughts as precisely as a butcher cleaves a cow into prime and subprime cuts of beef. It can be a paper bag that allows your hyperventilating mind to breathe. Commas are the nails, rivets, screws, joints, braces, brackets, hinges, pins and pegs in the vast architecture of human thought. Lose one, and the whole structure will threaten to rattle apart. Hazards abound. A sentence with a missing comma is a horse trailer coming unhitched on a highway at 70 miles per hour. A sentence with an extra comma is a boulder in your swimming pool.
Now look at Anne Carson’s comma. Something about it is slightly off.
She is describing, metaphorically, a common enough disappointment: We want our minds to be rigorous and logical — to bore down to the essence of things — but instead, more often, they play on the surface, brushing against this and that, making meaning willy-nilly.
The sentence itself reflects this. Its comma is being asked to do a little more than a comma is comfortable doing, like a tiny dam struggling to hold back a flood. Where logic seems to require a full stop — a period or a semicolon — we get instead only that partial pause, and so we are rushed forward into that final strange phrase, “instead I became a kind of brush.” Technically that’s called a comma splice, and technically it’s a grammatical error, but here it is perfect. Grammar and meaning merge. We expected hard reason, we got a soft brush.
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