Divided between Carelessness and Care

A Cultural History

Richard Hillyer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137368621
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137368638
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of "care" defines our humanity. Covering topics as diverse as familial care, medical care, artistic care, scientific care, and various other permutations of the term, this book examines the word and concept of "care" from a cultural perspective, tracing its use throughout literature and history.

Part I

Careful and Careless Words

Chapter 1

Native

The speaker of The Wanderer (ca. eighth century) experiences cearu twice, further expressing his outcast’s woe with three compounds built on -cearig. Including a glossary, the edition followed permits comparison between its modern equivalents for these five words and those offered by two translators:

One hypothetical version of The Wanderer reconstructed from the above table could center on a figure afflicted with “sorrow” or “sorrows,” “troubled in” or “sad at heart,” and “winter-sad” or “desolate as winter”; another could portray him as subject to “Care” or “cares,” and “wretched with care” or “careworn,” as well as cumbered “with wintry care.” Only “mōdcearig” breaks the pattern, as never given a Modern English equivalent stressing the second of its component parts, even though the obviously cognate “earmcearig” and “wintercearig” prove readily amenable to being glossed in terms of care. As Roy Leslie notes in his commentary to the edition followed for the original text, the Old English lexicon had additional “compounds of –cearig” with “nouns as their first elements” (69), including two surviving into Modern English: the OED identifies hrēow and sorg as the sources of rue and sorrow. Anglo-Saxon speakers thus did not merely suffer the blues: like a spectacularly ugly bruise, cearu and its companions housed a rainbow’s worth of variegated shades that now seem rather monotonous, however intense. Equally valid as established by experts in Old English literature, the hypothetical translations invoked illustrate how the differing degrees of semantic continuity and change perceived in cearu from its origins to the present generate conceivable versions of The Wanderer substantially reproducing the repetitiveness of its vocabulary on that one dimension or disguising it altogether for readers not consulting the original text.

In his edition of Chaucer’s works (ca. 1369–1400), F. N. Robinson glosses “Careful” (“full of care, trouble, or sorrow”) and “Caren, vb.” (“care, be anxious or troubled”), but not care as a noun, treated as self-explanatory when routinely twinned with such cognate terms as the Middle English equivalents of distress, dread, sorrow, and woe.² Conversely, Albert Baugh in his edition of the same author explicates not only “care” as noun (“sorrow, woe, worry”) and verb (“care, worry, sorrow”), but also “careful” (“sorrowful”).³ When the speaker of Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Prologue” generalizes, “We wedded men lyven in sorwe and care,” no doubt surrounds the nature of his claim, whatever his entitlement to such gloom (E 1228). Some ambiguity nonetheless colors Chaucer’s formulaic phrase “cares colde,” which occurs once in The Franklin’s Tale (F 1305), twice in The Legend of Good Women (F 762, 1955), and no fewer than six times in Troilus and Criseyde (I.264, III.1202, III.1260, IV.1692, V.1342, V.1747). According to Robinson’s glossary, “Colde” as a noun stands distinct from the adjective “Cold” and means “cold, chill” (940). Such a ruling indicates that Chaucer refers to these straits as possessed by care. But consider the phrase “dethes cares colde” (Troilus, IV.1692). Here, “cares” seems a plural term, modified by “colde,” as a trait belonging to death. John Tatlock and Percy MacKaye offer as a Modern English translation “cold pains of death.”⁴ Robinson’s glossary outlaws such a rendering except as more or less acceptably free. His rigidity on this point preserves the consistency expected in a formulaic expression, but raises the question of whether the correct rigidity and consistency thereby align. Nonetheless, even a reader unfamiliar with Middle English would rightly deduce that “cares colde” must locate “pains” somewhere in the dolorous territory of “sorrow, woe, worry”—the Wanderer’s only home.

If such a project had been possible in, say, Dryden’s lifetime, a translation of The Wanderer would have documented the peregrine’s careful disposition and corresponding inability to attain a careless state. The initial audience for this hypothetical version would have comprehended such points without realizing the great antiquity of careful and careless as used in this way: the OED’s illustrative citations for both terms go back to Anglo-Saxon times. These readers would thus have relied on translation to comprehend words whose original form and sense hardly differs from that of supposedly updated equivalents. Conversely, an equally hypothetical modern edition of a seventeenth-century Wanderer would require annotation to avert hazards of the kind Lewis describes:

The dominant sense of any word lies uppermost in our minds. Whenever we meet the word, our natural impulse will be to give it that sense. When this operation results in nonsense, of course, we see our mistake and try over again. But if it makes tolerable sense our tendency is to go merrily on. We are often deceived. In an old author the word may mean something different. I call such senses dangerous senses because they lure us into misreadings.⁵

The once highly familiar careful as care-fraught might be mistaken through its newly “dominant sense” as signifying diligence, for instance, if not obviously yielding “nonsense” and left unexplained. When such terms as used by “an old author” now receive annotations, these serve readers today for whom careful typically means the opposite of careless (as typically distinguished from carefree).

But these generalizations must be understood as period-specific claims about a language still elastic in many points of usage. “Take preposition with (an object); of (value); about (small things),” rules Theodore Bernstein regarding careful and careless alike.⁶ “There is probably nowhere else in English where changes of idiom have been more extensive than in the use of prepositions,” Baugh relevantly notes (xxxviii). Users of a living language constantly find new ways to introduce variants impossible to cover under any such schema as Bernstein’s. Reviewing Saul Bellow’s letters, Andrew O’Hagan judges them the work of an author who apparently “cared too much about his place in the literary world,” but softens this verdict by finding in the same source such more amiable traits as his “quite saintly manner of carefulness with John Berryman”: this rather unusual and stilted phrasing wonderfully evokes the kid glove tenderness necessary in handling so fragile and haunted a figure.⁷ Notwithstanding how far careful and careless now typically move in tandem with respect to their prepositions, moreover, the two terms have not become and never were purely antonymous, in part because care itself has no single, “dominant sense”; and such categories as “small things” remain as subjective as ever.

Hans J. and Michael W. Eysenck afford a historical perspective on care through a diagram illustrating how “the modern neuroticism-extraversion dimensional system” matches up with “the four temperaments” in the now outmoded model of individuals as grouped or differentiated by predominant humors reflecting various admixtures of air, fire, earth, and water.⁸ In this mapping of personality traits, the North-South axis runs from “UNSTABLE” to “STABLE,” and the West-East from “INTROVERTED” to “EXTRAVERTED.” Each of the resulting quadrants houses one of “the four temperaments”: “MELANCHOLIC” (NW), “CHOLERIC” (NE), “PHLEGMATIC” (SW), and “SANGUINE” (SE). In this mapping, “CAREFUL” proves a trait, lodged between “PASSIVE” and “THOUGHTFUL,” that falls under the general category of a “PHLEGMATIC” disposition. When the tradition of humoral psychology itself prevailed, however, “CAREFUL” would have been primarily understood as care-fraught, a trait closely allied with being “ANXIOUS,” “RIGID,” “SOBER,” and “PESSIMISTIC”—tendencies that the diagram links within the “MELANCHOLIC” quadrant. Though remaining on the “INTROVERTED” end of one axis, “CAREFUL” has thus shifted from “UNSTABLE” to “STABLE” on the other. “CAREFREE” likewise figures on the “STABLE” end of one axis, but also on the “EXTRAVERTED” end of the other, as linked with “RESPONSIVE,” “EASYGOING,” and “LIVELY” traits, under the general category of a “SANGUINE” disposition. In lodging “CAREFREE” next to “LEADERSHIP,” the diagram offers a potentially revealing point, not least because that unique noun among so many traits labeled with adjectives seems to reflect some strain in the conceptual model. “LEADERSHIP” had been precisely the attribute associated with exponents of aristocratic carelessness, the supposed preserve of an elite expecting and expected to show the way in all forms of activity, from setting fashion to commanding on battlefields. But whereas the diagram even as it stands reveals where care-fraught would go, it both has no place for careless as a current antonym for “CAREFUL” and reveals no obvious point at which that alternative for “CAREFREE” might be added, except precisely as a substituted synonym. In other words, careless for much of its history has enjoyed the same companions assigned to “CAREFREE,” such as “RESPONSIVE,” “EASYGOING,” and “LIVELY.” To conclude that “CAREFREE” merely translates careless into newer language, however, would leave unexplained the opposition between “CAREFUL” and careless, which has acquired a new significance precisely because “CAREFUL” no longer means care-fraught. Thus, careless in relation to both carefree and careful has a more complex history than that of careful in relation to care-fraught, a momentous but relatively straightforward transition from a destabilizing state associated primarily with “ANXIETY” to a disposition whose normality rests on the perceived appropriateness of its type or level of concern in relation to its object of concern. Even so, much still depends on the eye of the beholder.

“It is a loose and vague word, implying attention or inclination, in any degree more or less”: so Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) registers his exasperation with care as a noun (fourth sense). Arguably, however, he could have shown either more tolerance for the subjectivity thus governing “degree” in the one category or less tolerance for the promiscuity of care throughout most of its forms and meanings. The sheer longevity of care might account for some of its exceptionally complex profile: Stanley Hussey groups it with “love and . . . health, strength, wealth, worth” among “a small number of abstract nouns” that “can be traced back to O.E.”⁹ However, none of these other terms matches care for variability across its full range of forms and senses, not even the universal touchstone “love,” which encompasses a complex phenomenon, but also one that care in some measure subsumes as a portion (albeit especially profound) of its overall register. Thus, its longevity need not have coincided with the remarkably various ways English users have found to press care into service.

“With its two distinct but dovetailing meanings, ‘thoughtful’ is one of the great words of the English language,” enthuses P. M. Forni, with this elaboration: “You are thoughtful if you are a thinker, but you are also thoughtful if you are considerate. To be considerate, you need, first of all, to pay attention to other people and care for them—in other words, you need to think about them and their well-being.”¹⁰ Here, “care” only figures in the one sense of “thoughtful,” just as it only figures in one of the paired definitions that Forni quotes from Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary to bolster his claims: “HEEDFUL, CAREFUL, ATTENTIVE, ETC; ESPECIALLY, CONSIDERATE OF OTHERS; KIND” (149). But the “dovetailing meanings” he discerns as uniquely present in “thoughtful” belong no less to care, which more fully conveys the mystery of consciousness itself by combining them with angst.

The OED attempts to draw a distinction between its first entry for care as a noun (“Mental suffering, sorrow, grief, trouble (Obs.)”) and its second (“Burdened state of mind arising from fear, doubt, or concern about anything; solicitude, anxiety, mental perturbation; also in pl. anxieties, solicitudes”). According to the illustrative citations offered in support of these ranges of meaning, both existed from the Anglo-Saxon period until the first faded away, shortly after Pope published his version of Homer’s Iliad (1720), which describes how Apollo “infix’d unutterable Care / Deep in great Hector’s Soul.”¹¹ When rendering the singular word “ceare” in the plural form “sorrows” or “cares,” Gordon and Donaldson possibly hint that the OED’s second meaning, with its “pl. anxieties, solicitudes,” better fits their conception of the Wanderer’s state; alternatively, they update his language, suggesting that modern usage sometimes requires an abundance of woes to convey adequately the original weight of cearu. In all other respects, however, the OED appears to fashion a distinction without a difference. “Mental suffering” and “Burdened state of mind” both hit roughly the same mark and would serve equally well as a gloss fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   Careful and Careless Words
• Part II   Careful and Care-Fraught Types
• Part III   Careless and Carefree Types
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index