JUXTAPOSITION

We humans are obsessed with contrast. We need juxtaposition in English. A villain for every hero. Contrasting colors are our favorite. To feel love, we need hate. To feel joy, we need sadness. We love to taste opposing spices in food. We find it easiest to appreciate things when we are reminded that they are not a given. Another story in the "In Short" book is "The Opposite of Saffron," by Mary Paumier Jones, which demonstrates this idea wonderfully:


Minneapolis, Minnesota
I don't remember this, I was too young. But my mother and father told me of my childhood habit time and again. From their point of view: their first child wakes in the middle of the night, wakes them up too, not with cries but with giggles. She laughs and recites all the words they have taught her, her litany. I picture Mom getting back in bed after the first time. "What's the matter?" "Nothing, she's laughing and reciting her words." "Now?" "Yes, now." Night after night I did the same.
One day Dad taught me to say Minneapolis, Minnesota, a triumph of such magnitude it became my permanent finale, new words inserted before its resonance. When they heard "Minneapolis, Minnesota," my parents knew they could go back to sleep.
Dictionaries
One grade school summer I set myself a daily regime. In the room I shared with my sister at a small desk, I-what should I call it, played school? studied? Nothing sounds exactly right. But I allotted time for this and that, and day after day found satisfaction there alone.
Praying was one thing I did, or my version of it, which had a lot in common with daydreaming, a blue and white statue of the Virgin Mary with the snake under her foot there to inspire me to fantasies of sainthood in which i was believed and admired by millions.
And I read the dictionary-yes, read the dictionary. My goal was to get through it in the course of the summer-which I'm suer I didn't do, but no matter. The column of words were an endless feast.
Some forty years later I bought a used set of the tiny print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I had to find a stand magnifier for it because using the hand-held one that comes with it makes me nauseous. So now I can look up any English word and get its entire history compete with examples of use through the centuries, right in the comfort of my own home.
I lust after the large print edition-or the regular size print edition, I should say-the new updated twenty-four volume $2500.00 one. A set sits proudly on the ledge behind the cash register in a bookstore I frequent. Whenever I buy anything- which us appallingly often-I look at it and fantasize saying, "Oh, and throw in the OED too."
Syzygy

A word I looked up; syzygy. (File it away in case you ever have three y's in Scrabble-or can you have three y's in Scrabble?) The morning paper announced that the moon's perigee was falling on its syzygy. The paper called these words "cold and rational," an odd description because syzygy sounds to me as if it sizzles, which indeed it does, coming from the Greek for yoke, pair, conjunction, copulation. (Remember copulative verbs? What a shame they've been demoted to linking.)
A curious thing has happened to syzygy; time can do strange things to words as well as people. Originally referring to the conjunction of two heavenly bodies, since sometime in the 1700's syzygy has included both conjunction and opposition, so the word has become one for those few whose meaning has extended to include its opposite.
I knew there was a full moon coming. The full is the opposition, the syzygy when the sun and the moon are aligned on opposite sides of the earth. The moon's perigee is the point in its orbit where it is closest to earth. About once a year or so, the full moon occurs at the point when the moon is closest, the perigee and syzygy together. If the clouds clear off, we'll see a big moon tonight.
The Possible Sunshine

All February the clouds refused to clear off. "Cold air moving over Lake Ontario formed the clouds that blocked the sun," the paper said. "The city got only twenty percent of the possible sunshine."
Then one morning it is over. Objects have volume in space, reflect light, take up room. We have been looking at the world dimensional page instead of crosshatched sphere bulging forward, casting shadow.
Telephone wires scallop the road. Cars trail bulbous gray shapes. I'll need my sunglasses-where might they be? Porch railings stripe porch and wall. My old dog feels a rush of youth, pulls against the double leash. And I -even I- am here, my being unmistakable, I cast a shadow, therefore I am.
Odd, but we don't think about it, how the absence of sun is also the absence of shadow.
Just the Opposite

In Tai Chi class Dr. Young talked about yin and yang. In the beginning square form, each movement is followed by a pause: the movement is yin, the pause yang. To my Western ears this smacks of sexism:the masculing principle acting;the feminine doing nothing. But I eventually begin to learn the pause is not nothing. Given its proper weight, gravity, and time, the pause does its work, its stretch, its subtle modification of the quality of the move before and the one to come. Later in the round from, the movement is continuous. Yin and yang, though still opposite, are inscrutably simultaneous, engaged in an ancient abstract intercourse.
In Sunday's New York Times David Richards reviews a stage performance by George C. Scott. TO encompass it he proposes what he calls a "thoery of contradictory impulses." Scott excels in a mediocre role, Richards says, because before giving the audience one emotion, he gives a hint of its opposite: laughter before tears, hate before love. This works because it reflects how life is, each emotion closer to its opposite than to anything like itself.
As a child in Eastern Europe, fiber artist Neda Al-Hilali know a lot of gray socks for the family, always gray. She lusted for color and when she once managed to get some bright yarn, she hid it as a American boy might his copy Playboy, looking at it, touching, working in secret ecstasy under her bedcovers.
Now she is internationally known for her mastery of color. And personally known as a wonderful cook-her classes usually end with festive party meals. When asked how she gets her colors so vibrant, she replies that she always puts a dash of the opposite dye in the pot. "You know, " she says as if everyone does, "just like you put in a bit of an opposite spice when you cook."