From the Boat
Dear all,
The barometric pressure at this latitude has been, for the better part of a fortnight, extraordinary in its steadiness. I do not say this to boast, though I will note that my physician, a man I have not consulted since 1989, once told me that steady pressure was the condition most conducive to clear thinking. He was probably speaking about blood. Nevertheless. The sea is glassy and the sky has that particular shade of grey one associates with competence, and I have been thinking about the enterprise, as I do when the engine is not troubling me.
A newspaper arrived on Tuesday, or what I have chosen to call Tuesday. It was dated late September and carried an item in the business supplement about a publishing house in London that had recently discontinued its annual style guide on the grounds that, quote, "language moves faster than print can follow." I read this three times. I then set the newspaper on the rail and watched it lift in the wind and eventually depart for the water, which seemed the appropriate editorial response. The enterprise has been following language since 1974. Language, in my experience, does not move. It accumulates. It gathers substance. That is, after all, the entire point.
I think often of the staff retreat in October of 1986, held in a lodge outside of Burlington, which I recall as being in Vermont, though several people have since told me it was in New Hampshire. I maintain Vermont. Margaret was there, or at least her presence was felt throughout the weekend, in the typeface on the printed agenda, in the warmth that gathered around every long table where people argued seriously about words. We spent the better part of a Saturday debating whether "amplitude" belonged in the volume. I believe we voted yes. I believe we were right. Those were the years when the enterprise understood itself, and when sixty-two dollars a month for a Manhattan office, fully serviced, still seemed like a reasonable thing.
Bart's decision in Issue Nine to reorganize the seasonal addenda by alphabetical rather than etymological order gave me pause. I sat with that pause for eleven days. I have concluded that he knows something I do not, or that he will, eventually, and that the enterprise is better for having someone aboard, so to speak, who is unafraid of reorganization. I do not rescind my pause. I simply file it.
There was an advertisement I used to see in the back pages of several magazines in the early seventies, for a correspondence course in vocabulary building. It read, and I have never forgotten this, "Words are the only luggage that cannot be lost by the airline." I have always thought that was almost right. The enterprise exists, in some part, to make it fully right.
The enterprise must carry on.
Bertram Whitmore
Publisher, At Sea