The Lexicon - Serried

One word, weekly. Found in a book. Shared with you.

Word: Serried

Definition: (adj) crowded or pressed together: compact

Origin: MF pp. of serrer to press, crowd, grasp; from LL serare to bolt, latch; from L sera bar for fastening a door

Source: The Plague by Albert Camus (translation by Stuart Gilbert)

Wave after wave of heat flows over the frontage of the tall gray houses during these long, languid hours. Thus the afternoon wears on, slowly merging into an evening that settles down like a red winding-sheet on the serried tumult of the town. At the start of the great heat, for some unascertained reason, the evenings found the streets almost empty. But now the least ripple of cooler air brings an easing of the strain, if not a flutter of hope. Then all stream out into the open, drug themselves with talking, start arguing or love-making, and in the last glow of sunset the town, freighted with lovers two by two and loud with voices, drifts like a helmless ship into the throbbing darkness.

Though there is much that feels eerily familiar in the epidemic-struck land in Camus's The Plague, the way people press together -- on the sidewalks, in the streetcars, at the cafes and theaters -- is utterly foreign here in our socially distanced world. The whole time I was reading, I kept being upended by their physical proximity to one another. If they contracted the plague, there was isolation and quarantine, but up until that moment of disease, they maintain a nearness that made me wish for them the same cheery grocery store announcements we've endlessly heard, imploring us to "maintain a distance of six feet for all our safety and well being!"

In some ways, this makes sense. They closed off the town to keep the plague from spreading to other localities (impossible to imagine in today's high-traffic world), which meant they were trapped with the disease. It would be reasonable to adopt an attitude of "nothing to do about it now!" and carry on as best they could. Knowing what we do about viral transmission, however, I was in anguish over these serried streets.

And I can't help but connect this word to its neighbor 'serrate,' with its mouth full of crowded teeth, ready to cut or tear or bite. Had the town not been so pressed together, so willing to enter into the serried tumult, how many lives might have been saved? How many, in exchange for a few months of lonely and longing, might have avoided death's serrated edge?

On Sundays, We Read Poetry

Each Sunday, I post a brief introduction to a collection of poetry I've been loving. I include one poem that I think really sings. No review. No need. If it's here, you'll know I recommend it. If you have one to recommend (yours or someone else's), send it along. I'll do my best to be here every Sunday.

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Ted Kooser's back with some thoughts from March. The interesting thing about these poetic paragraphs is that even the ones that aren't as thought-provoking or lovely to me can still have a sentence or phrase in them that shines. I may not respond immediately to the lost billfold, but the description of the owner of that wallet standing "in the steady boat of your shadow" can still stop me with awe.

This month, the one I'm sitting with starts a bit awkwardly with the arrival of a lumbering dog. But oh, the work it does from there.

Howard, my yellow lab, has lugged a heavy cow bone up from some cleft in the pasture and left it on the lawn like a rolled up Sunday paper, its news almost completely gnawed away by weather, though one can read a little of it: how the hoofprints of her sisters brimmed and stank with muddy water and the flies were like sparks in her eyes. And in almost every paragraph it seems that grass is mentioned, like a prayer. But Howard has tired of the lowing woes of a cow's last report, dried out and hollow now, and has fallen asleep. He dreams of a bone cracked open before him, the violent language of marrow, like licking the red from a sunset.