The River Has Roots

“There was a time when grammar was wild—when it shifted shapes and unleashed new forms out of old. Grammar, like gramarye, like grimoire. What is magic but a change in the world? What is conjugation but a transformation, one thing into another?”

The first chapter introduces the concept of “grammar,” which is crucial to both the novella’s plot and themes, particularly The Power of Language. This passage establishes the wild and transformative magic of grammar and introduces the important motif of wordplay, both of which contribute to the fantastical and folkloric tone of the narrative.

“You might think that something about the shape of those trunks, the sweep of their twisted crowns, reminds you of something, or someone, you’ve lost—something, or someone, you would break the world to have again. Something, you might think, happened here, long, long ago; something, you might think, is on the cusp of happening again.

But that is the nature of grammar—it is always tense, like an instrument, aching for release, longing to transform present into past into future, is into was into will.”

The narrator introduces the willow trees called the Professors in the first chapter, establishing willows as an important symbol of the boundary between the wildness of the Modal Lands and the controlled environment of the human world. As a whole, the passage embodies the metafictional approach of the novella, drawing attention to itself as a story that happened “long, long ago” but is also “on the cusp of happening,” as readers are about to encounter it. The novella associates this blurring of time with Arcadia, but here, it also links it to the power of language; punning on “tense” as “verb tense,” the narrator suggests stories’ ability to transport readers to other times or even alter the passage of time.