In a Killing the Buddha review of God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars by Benjamin Lazier, historian James Chappel writes:

Perhaps the problem is the one diagnosed by Hannah Arendt: the collapse of orthodox religion has not caused us to turn towards the world with the piety and love once accorded God.

But was God accorded that piety and love—or did we instead accord love to the old comforting myths, rituals, social institutions, and ancient traditions?

Is the problem that people have stopped sincerely believing in and loving supernal Powers Beyond Time & Space and failed to transfer that intense, gut-level belief/love to something new? Or that people have stopped putting effort into maintaining outmoded traditions, even if those traditions served valuable psychological functions?

Am I saying we should go back to the old religions? Hecks no.

Yet how we frame the question of wha’ happened to God is important. A contrast cannot be drawn between “sincere belief” and some modern or postmodern apostasy. Humans still have complex feelings about their roles as living beings, mortal but equipped with powerful imaginative faculties. We are still mortal.

(Rebecca Goldstein argues that both Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes viewed religion as based on a terror of mortality and thus anarchic forces to be curbed by the rational state.)

We have not turned to the world with the love we accorded God, because a) God is not the world and b) we never accorded God anything. We still feel deeply. But today’s world is worse at channeling intense, transcendent feelings. These feelings leave our heads at night and drift out over the city like gray bats. They cause us stomach pains at work. They are sublimated, turned into a general conviction that things are okay, because we elected Obama, because we ourselves are not starving (and sorry to anyone truly starving who reads this).

To slay the metaphor, the mash-up between a rational, urban, modern life and a very old terror is not yet finished being edited.

I, for one, am excited to see the final cut.

People always ask me, “Wythe, what the fuck is punctuation all about? I mean, why we do it? How I’m supposed to?”

I usually wave my hands descriptively and draw crude mantic sigils in the wintry earth with a rod stolen from one of the quaint trees of McCarren Park. The asker usually massages his brow and departs, none the wiser.

But some askers persist. In honor of their persistence, I am now going to try to answer the question: “What be punctuation?”

Ahem.

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Punctuation is the orthographic representation of any number of meaningful pauses in prose. It is not only meant to duplicate the naturally meaningful, unconscious pauses we make in when we speak; rather, punctuation also represents those mental pauses that both precede spoken words and dictate the rhythm of written ones.

Each mark has evolved a number of often conflicting uses over the years, but all essentially demarcate shifts, however subtle, functional, or dramatic, in rhythm and, occasionally, tone.

On the most abstract level, the marking of punctuation is an attempt to positively represent a negative or contextual type of information (apophasis). Punctuation is not “meta” information, but the context for the information we’re generally seeking. (Thus, punctuation exists on the same order of information as the prose it frames.)

When examined individually, the origins and histories of most punctuation marks are as richly textured as those other glyphs, even moreso. And yet few debate the merit of, say, the letter B, while many probably question the raison d’etre of the vein-tightening semicolash (;—) or the venerable double dagger (‡).

Daggers aside, except in certain scholarly and experimental works, punctuation should be invisible. A writer’s words should be sufficient to propel a reader’s eyes forward; the flow of positive information should not be tripped up for lack of punctuation—as in “yes but I didn’t know then that Mr. Welles a famous director whose movies I had seen had also made commercials for crappy wine which I sometimes enjoy myself truth be told.”

But neither should punctuation become burdensome. Beckett and other anti-punctuationalists set out to make use of the minimum possible punctuation, at times to very strong effect.

In general, punctuation’s rhetorical uses vary, and each mark’s function has changed and will continue to change over time. Regardless, all punctuation works essentially to help readers avoid confusion (or, in the case of some experimental writings, to cause an intentional confusion via anti-use).

Invisible and unloved, the comma and its kin soldier on. Thank ye kindly.