WISTFUL

Today you’ll have to forgive us for today’s audio “special effects.” Tony made two tries at recording, and at the very end of the second “take,” Molly decided that SHE had something important to say. Alas.

Ah, the delightful oddities of English words!

We know what a beautiful flower is: it is a flower that is full of beauty. It doesn’t matter that full comes from our German stock and beauty comes from the Norman French. We in English rearrange roots and prefixes and suffixes as we please. A plentiful harvest is one that’s full of plenty, which when you think of it is a funny sort of redundancy: it’s a harvest full of fullness, with plenty coming from that same Norman French, and not only that, it’s a cousin of full to begin with.

But if we say that an X-ful thing is full of X, we have to pull up short. “Hold on a second,” someone shrewd with English words will wave his arm. “A dreadful reckoning doesn’t exactly mean that the reckoning itself is full of dread, but that the reckoning causes a lot of dread in whoever’s going to be weighed in the balance. It’s the same with fearful. It can mean that the sheep is afraid of the tiger, but it can also mean that the tiger is fearful because he causes fear in the sheep.” And then, dear Readers, we have our Word of the Week, wistful. Are you wistful when you’re full of — what? Wist? What’s that?

Usually I save my talking about a word’s history till the end, but with wistful I think it will do better to say up front how the word came to be. It was whistful — and please keep in mind that the difference in pronunciation between wh and w was once consistently observed. You can tell that from how we say who: not woo, but hoo, because it was the w that got absorbed into the following rounded vowel. Try it — try saying hwoo, hwoo, hwoo, and eventually sliding over to hoo, as easier to pronounce. We apparently got from whistful to wistful not because people stopped pronouncing wh as wh (really, hw, or an unvoiced w: try pronouncing a w but without letting your vocal cords vibrate). We got there because whistful reminded people of wishful, both in sound and in meaning.

Still, what’s whist, that somebody should be filled with it? It’s not a noun but an adjective, and it’s imitative. Think of modern English shushed: it means that somebody has said, “Shush! Be still!” It’s the sound of whispered breath. That’s what whisht or whist was: shushed! So the meaning is silenced, shushed, quieted, stilled. Shakespeare uses it that way when Ariel sings his haunting song in The Tempest:

Come unto these yellow sands,
and then take hands,
Curtsied when you have, and kissed
the wild waves whist.

Ariel is calling upon the sprites of wind and sand and sea, to come to the shore, to take hands, to curtsy, and to kiss the wild waves into silence, to make them whist, to shush them with a kiss. So then, to be “whist-ful” is to be full of hush, quiet, silence after sound.

And now let’s think about what that means. I’ll give you several scenes. There’s a boy sitting at a window. He’s frail. He’s watching as a bunch of loud and brash and happy boys play a game of touch football. He can’t do that. He doesn’t move, he doesn’t say anything. All he does is look. His lips are pressed together a little. He sighs. He is wistful.

There’s a woman at home. Her husband’s out, so she’s by herself. She goes to sit on the back porch, and her eye lights upon a big tree in the yard, and she can just see nailed to the trunk, dangling cockeyed, one of the pieces of wood that used to be the “ladder” to a tree house. And she thinks about when the children were small — they now have homes of their own — and when her husband, a lot more agile then, scrambled up the trunk to build that treehouse, and she can see the children in her mind’s eye, and hear their voices, still childlike. She sighs, and smiles a little. She is wistful.

I go to an old bowling alley where, when I was a boy, one of the priests in our parish set up a bowling league for our grade school. I was in that league for three years, till high school. The sound of the bowling balls and the pins is the same — how could it be otherwise? Some of the smell of the bowling alley is the same — the oil on the lanes; the coffee and the hamburgers served at the small luncheonette. That’s the alley where my high-school girl friend and I would go on a Friday night, to bowl two or three games, just for fun. My mother bowled there in a ladies’ league too. The people who established the bowling alley were thinking of poor old Rip Van Winkle and his twenty years of being the pin-boy for a lot of bowling and heavy-drinking dwarfs in the cliffs overlooking the Hudson River. So they called it, in jest, Idle Hour Lanes, and had the stone walls painted with cartoon murals of Rip and the dwarfs, the pins and the bowling balls and the jugs marked “XXX” for the whiskey. But now I see that all those paintings are gone, and the guy at the counter, not a young fellow, has no idea that they ever existed. After I look around a bit, I find an unconsidered corner where just a trace remains. And I think, and have good reason too, that the old bowling alley was a nicer place. Oh, not that it was ever whist — a bowling alley could hardly be that! Unless you get there before anybody else just after opening time, I suppose. But as for me, I am wistful.

Odysseus on Calypso’s island, gazing out to sea; Nehemiah approaching Jerusalem and its ruined walls; Saint Paul writing his last letter to Timothy; Philip Nolan in the old story “The Man Without a Country,” condemned to live out his life at sea and never to hear any news about the United States or even any mention of her name, because at his trial for treason the young man expressed a wish that he might never hear of her again. Yet his heart changed, and over the many long years he repented; and at his death the sailors find a slip of paper with these words written on it: “Bury me in the sea; it has been my home, and I love it. But will not someone set up a stone for my memory at Fort Adams or at Orleans, that my disgrace may not be more than I ought to bear? Say on it:

In Memory of PHILIP NOLAN,
Lieutenant in the Army of the United States.

“He loved his country as no other man has,
but no man deserved less at her hands.”

Those are wistful, all. They are deeply human. People may scoff at them for their nostalgia, but let the scoffers be; they hurt only themselves. And the scenes suggest to us all what Nolan in that same story read in the Bible, on the page where those instructions are found: “They desire a country, even a heavenly wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.”

“A Wistful Look,” James Carroll Beckwith. Public Domain