In the current issue of Modernism / modernity (September 2023, published early 2024), Christian H. Gelder’s “‘To Measure is All We Know’: William Carlos Williams and the Science of Measurement” offers readings of the persistent word measure in Williams’s oeuvre. Williams’s long-term readers know that that’s an important word for Williams precisely because he never defines it. It’s just out there in the oeuvre, a term endlessly approaching an ever-receding frontier of meaning.

Until today, I considered myself one of those long-term readers. I taught Williams for years, I wrote about him, and I continue to love him. I was a loving reader on campus. Until today, I could have put that sentence in the present tense. But Gelder’s article looks like a chapter of a dissertation, heavy on current citations — and those citations are to a scholarship that seems to have appeared while I was off campus. Title after title in the bibliography refers now to a pair of concepts that I’d failed until now to consider even separately: autobiography (of the article’s author, not of Williams) and race. Says article after article now: this is what I have to say about the racial meanings of Williams’s mathematical word measure, and I say what I say as a member of an ethnic category.

During the years when I was writing I wasn’t that kind of I. I didn’t say the pronoun that way. I didn’t say, “Speaking as a [name of ethnic category], I . . .” But (says the bibliography) not many people on campus now seem to say I in any other way. They have become what I seem never to have been, and I and whatever I once was have been rolled out of the lexicon. Outside it, we are unreadable. Whatever might have been sayable of us then as a single term, such as writer or I, can no longer be said of us now at all. All that may remain now of whatever is something prior in the void.

Here in the void, consider the conversational essay by Charles Lamb in which somebody once upon a time uttered four words in a voice that then became the passive voice. It was a moment when passivity took dominion, and it was forever. To its grammatical object then, something that was said in the moment has now exited the moment. Ever since and forever, it now says:

“Madam, you are superannuated.”