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an e-mail note. The student had gone to the library to begin research for
a paper on Pompeii and had been disconcerted to discover that some of the
sources were in foreign languages, that the materials were scattered in
dif–
ferent parts of the library collection, and that she was faced with the
Herculean-or at least Xena-ish-task of sorting through all this debris to
reach the material she wanted. A thoroughly modern student, she plain–
tively asked her professor, "Is there a website?"
This student-dare I call her Perplexified Penelope?-possesses a
highly-developed version of a skill characteristic to our age. She knows
how to make simple tasks appear overwhelmingly difficult. Reading her
brief, semi-literate note to her teacher, one can almost hear the laborious
groaning of the mental gears and the anxious twi ttering of the neurons
confronted with the task of spelling such big words as " immensely" and
"library." What soul could be so hardened as to read this without pity–
and without wishing that Penelope find the Elysian browser that will waft
her gently from website to website throughout her life, without the toil of
having to reboot?
To make things seem harder than they really are: English does not have
a ready word for this, a lack which it is high time we remedied. I can sug–
gest several possibilities to capture shades of meaning:
arduize, impassify,
dijficate,
and
operose
seem useful, the last an adjective that could immigrate
to verb-dom. I am particularly partial, however, to another possibility: to
cumbersomicate,
as in, "Asked to make her bed, young Penelope cumber–
somicated until her mother did it for her."
I do not mean to suggest that only students arduize and impassifY. The art
is highly developed in universities, and students learn from the splendid exam–
ples set by faculty members and administrators. What is much contemporary
literary theory or
art
criticism or philosophy but advanced cumbersomifica–
tion? Would we not wish to say, for example, "Professor X employed a
Foucaultian-feminist analysis to difficate on the works ofJane Austen?"
Things were not always so. In the 1570s, Sir Philip Sidney was in
his early twenties and, not unlike some young people today, waiting
around. Despite his prodigious gifts-high birth, intellect, and relent–
less ambition-the world had not beaten a path to his door. To be sure,
he had not made it easy for himself. His exuberance was not tailor–
made for a queen who believed that governing required an unusually
even keel. Nonetheless, whatever his feelings were on the occasion of
his underemployment, Sir Philip spent his time well, writing his
Difense
of Poesy.
This magnificent and magisterial essay, which he wrote when he was
just 26, is a tour-de-force of
sprezzatura-the
skill of seeming effortless. For
courtiers of the sixteenth century, this skill was a practical requirement to
