Habitus

Thom Satterlee Language, he asserted, was a habitus…What precisely he meant by habitus is not explained but the context in which the word is applied to language would suggest sense of “clothing.” Anne Hudson, “Wyclif and the English Language” All morning he read from a thick volume propped on a stand. He read and he read, and when he closed his eyes he continued to read until the words took off their clothes and laid them down on a hillside that vanished whenever a cloud passed between it and the sun. All his life Wyclif had wanted this: the words undressed and he going to them, a child to a fair, burning to see if Faith wore her hair in a braid, whether Why held out its hands, palms up, and where Simony put his coins when he stood naked in the light. But no: Wyclif had got it all wrong. He was not going to see the words. They were coming to him With their arms loaded with robes stacked so high he couldn’t see their faces, and before he knew it, invisible hands began measuring him with ropes stretched between his wrist and his chest, from his hip down to the ground, around his waist and around his neck. The fitting took all day. He tried on Son and Friend, Scholar, Reformer, Heretic, he slipped into Priest, wore also Doctor Evangelicus and Morning Star. Some robes hung too loosely; others pinched his neck. In the end, he had to wear them all and learn the sadness of being a word— only one surface to show the world while he lived underneath the layers and listened for the barely audible sound of his own heart beating. ~~~~~ From Burning Wycliff, copyright 2006 Thom Satterlee: reprinted with permission from Texas Tech University Press.