This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

Moylan had all the tools of rhetoric. If you stayed in school past the age of twelve you learned them then. Things like Johnson’s Letter to Chesterfield or various bits of Swift were taught, you knew your clauses and subclauses and had homework parsing sentences. You knew everything from alliteration, allusion, amplification, analogy and anaphora (‘If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?’ I could recite every speech of Shylock’s once. God bless the day) to metonyms and metaphors, oxymorons and similes. After Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, the next thing you learned in Latin was non solo sed etiam. What I’m saying is, it was foundational, and admired, the bit of flourish. On Moylan went, letting fly with antanagoge (‘This heater is not as beautiful as your fire, but it puts out more kilowatts’), enumeratio (‘The motor, the pump and the drum, all the very latest’) and epizeuxis (‘Power, power, power’).