Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On (not) withering. Meanwhile, I do not wither, I wrote, and Robert (who’s been a friend for about 40 years now) paid me an extravagant compliment:

Age cannot wither you, nor custom stale your infinite variety.

— adapting a quotation from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus discoursing about Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety” (Act II, scene 2)

I am, in fact, considerably withered by age; there was a time when I played racquetball, well enough to play in tournaments, and regularly walked at least a couple miles a day, while now I need a walker to get around, can’t climb stairs or get down on (or even reach) the floor, and am mostly housebound. I am, however, jaunty and (within my limits) energetic; and my mind is undimmed, so I can write postings like this one (which, however, take a lot of time, mostly because my fingers don’t work very well). And I am, wildly, a fox rather than a hedgehog, so that my variety is considerable — but not infinite, instead just big, really big (large and containing multitudes, you might say).

So Robert’s adapted quotation is sweetly hyperbolic. It does, however, make me a bit uneasy, because I consider the original to be inauspicious. The verb wither was the right one to use for the plants, and I gingerly extended it to myself metaphorically — hoping, however, not to evoke the quotation from Antony and Cleopatra.

Here’s the thing. The Egyptian queen Cleopatra of this play is imperious, headstrong, vain, foolish, and wildly extravagant, not someone I’d take as a model. She is, however, passionately in love with the Roman triumvir Antony, with whom she intends to rule Egypt (and his third of the Roman Empire). But then, alas, when A gets a message that C is dying, A, believing that he cannot live without her, kills himself. C, who had hoped merely that the message would bring him to her, now finding herself without him and facing the humiliation of being taken to Rome as a prisoner, arranges to have deadly asps smuggled to her in a basket of figs (the basket of figs isn’t important; I just enjoy the detail), uses one of them to kill herself. Other asps from the basket take down C’s two serving maids, and we then have a standard Shakespearean tragic climax — a stage piled with dead bodies — followed by some post-tragedy cleanup plot. (I have cut out most of a remarkably busy story.) The larger point is that Shakespeare manages to make Cleopatra a complex character, with some depth to her. But she’s undone by her vanity and foolishness, her tragic flaws.

So I’d prefer not to be matched to Cleopatra, even if only metaphorically. Yes, I do understand that RC alluded to the quotation only to convey that I have failed to wither with age and continue to exhibit great variety, but he provided an only slightly adjusted version of the quotation, so I was impelled into Shakespeare’s depiction of the character, and that made me uncomfortable. But it’s still an amazing compliment, and I’m deeply touched.

Now, if I wanted to compliment a remarkable linguist — say, Barbara Partee or Larry Horn — on their long career and wide range of work, I think I’d settle for a glancing allusion to the Shakespeare, say by writing, as above, that they have failed to wither with age and continue to exhibit great variety.

(Glancing allusions illustrated above in my references to foxes and hedgehogs and to my containing multitudes.)