This Figure Has a Power We Can Measure

If only you and I could pronounce it.

I’m just back from two weeks of reading books in a secret place a few miles from home. For the past several years, friends have loaned me their house on a protected New Hampshire lake as an annual birthday gift. I turn older in late August, when the bugs have left and the water is warm. Loon calls wake me up at night. In the morning, I load a waterproof pack onto my paddleboard and cross the lake to a swamp, then hike to one of several waterside spots where I set up a backpacking hammock and an ingenious collapsible chair.

And there I read all day while dozens of frogs hover on the rim of the dark water, only their eyeballs visible. There is nothing richer than a swamp, and no better place to enjoy it than a hammock slung between trees whose roots connect land and water. The air smells of wet leaves, mushrooms, and warm metallic granite.

In this liminal place, wildlife comes to me. The other day a curious moose calf approached perilously close while its mother browsed an abandoned beaver lodge offshore, snorting ecstatically while ignoring her baby. That same day, a casual bald eagle soared overhead and triggered the loons’ operatic fright call. Then a great blue heron’s wings made a leathery flap as it shifted fishing spots.

There’s no cell service here, no Wi-Fi. No phone, no pictures. Just the books I hold in my backpack, along with a horde of unhealthy food.

This time, I had one regret: my lame inability to convey the swamp’s astonishing beauty. Three of the vacation books are jewels that put my descriptive writing to shame. Peter Heller’s latest novel, Burn, shows off his skill in infusing page-turning thriller with achingly lovely descriptions of Maine’s landscape. Peter, an outdoorsman (and friend), has made himself a bestselling author by infusing his plots with poetry. I read and think, I’m not worthy.

Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield, sets her characters in southwestern Virginia, a region devastated by the opioid epidemic. The narrator manages to tell his heartbreaking story with humor that made me laugh loud enough to make the frogs duck. It was Kingsolver’s elegiac description of the Appalachian landscape that put me in the virtual South.

But of all the books, only one had me rereading passages and saying them out loud: Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead. One passage in particular—spoken by the narrator, a preacher who has come near the end of his life—seemed eerily apt for swampside reading:

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

Robinson uses two figures here. One of them provides the color for the literary Peter Hellers and Barbara Kingsolvers: thaumasmus (“wonder” or “marveling”), and the unpronounceable epixeuxis (“to join together”).

The thaumasmus is a figure of thought that sings of loon calls and insouciant eagles and watchful frogs. The ancients associated the figure with Thaumus, god of the wonder of the sea. E. M. Berens, a classical scholar in the 1800s, described Thaumus’s beat this way:

“Thaumas (whose name signifies Wonder) typifies that peculiar, translucent condition of the surface of the sea when it reflects, mirror-like, various images, and appears to hold in its transparent embrace the flaming stars and illuminated cities, which are so frequently reflected on its glassy bosom.”

Glassy bosom. Sigh.

Back to the other figure, the epixeuxis (pronounced only if you’re sober, epih-ZOOX-is). This figure of speech repeats a word for emphasis. But it does more than simply emphasize. The magic of the epixeuxis lies in its multiplier effect. A thousand thousand is not two thousand, it’s a million. But if Robinson had rewritten the sentence to read, “There are a million reasons to live this life,” some of the air would have been sucked out. She could have written, “There are myriad reasons…” A myriad represented a thousand in ancient Greece. A myriad myriad was, wait for it, a million. The ingenious Greek mathematician Pythagoras took the myriad to the air by inventing the concept of powers. A myriad to the fourth power is 1,000,000,000,000.

When you repeat words, you multiply their power. Compare these two phrases. Which has more power?

Many, many creatures in that swamp.

A great many creatures in that swamp.

Joseph Conrad was being memorably horrific when he ended the Heart of Darkness with “The horror! The horror!” He may have borrowed from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whose Macduff cries “O horror, horror, horror!”

Note that neither one says, “Well, that was awful.”

Shakespeare, who seems to have memorized a great many figures at the Stratford Grammar School, loved the epixeuxis. His Lear mourns epixeuxisly, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,/ And thou no breath at all?/ Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never!” That’s death to the fourth power!

Churchill used three nevers when he urged his wartime constituents to “Never, never, never give in.” He may have channeled the jingoistic eighteenth-century song, Rule Brittania. The popular way to sing it multiplied the nevers: “Britons never never never will be slaves!”

You can hear the epixeuxis in modern politics and pop culture. It heightens emotions and expresses absolutes. Tony Blair on Prime Minister John Major: “Weak, weak, weak.” Sarah Palin on Barack Obama’s call for negotiations: “Just so tired of hearing the talk, talk, talk. Tired of hearing the talk.” That Sarah Palin; she has a beat you can dance to!

Oprah Winfrey on running a talk show: “I really hated, hated, hated being sent to report on other people’s tragedies as a part of my daily duty.”

I could go on. There’s John Lennon’s Long long long, realtors’ “location, location, location,” the Music Man’s “Ya can bicker bicker bicker you can talk talk talk…,” and Coleridge’s eerie Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Alone, alone, all alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea.

The figure of speech employs unusual language. In the case of the epixeuxis, the figure sets words in an unusual pattern. It injects power by the myriad myriads. And it can help portray the beauty and the horror of nature.

I’m already looking forward to my swampside reading a year from now. Its glassy bosom contains a thousand thousand reasons to visit.