Infinitives as Openers
There are
two forms to the Infinitive:
‘To’ Infinitive: The Jamaicans are expected to win.
Bare Infinitives
(the particle ‘to’ is excluded): The Jamaicans
could win.
Bare
Infinitives usually follow modals such as could
and would.
The
infinitive form of the verb has no time span—past, present, or future—and it is
never conjugated.
Only “To
Infinitives” may be used as sentence openers:
To love with
one’s soul and leave the rest to fate, was the simple rule she heeded (Nabokov
40).
To wind up
the last scene of thy tragedy, CRUELTY and COWARDICE, twin ruffians, hired and
set on by MALICE in the dark, shall strike together at all thy infirmities and
mistakes (Stern 20).
To prove that
he was still a sound and freethinking stalwart, Elmer went out with Jim one
evening and at considerable effort, they carried off a small outhouse and
placed it on the steps of the Administration Building (Lewis 37).
To paraphrase
Hamlet,
“The serpent that did sting thy father’s life, his crown wants to wear”
(Guerrero 115).
To prepare a
shirt for pressing she sprinkled it with water and left it rolled up in a towel
(Franzen 265).
Samuel
Beckett, in Molloy, achieves a mocking and sarcastic tone by his precise use of
infinitives:
To throw him
in the hole was all I could have done, and I would have done it gladly (13).
To say I
stumbled in impenetrable darkness, no, I cannot. I stumbled, but the darkness
was not impenetrable (83).
To cut a
long story short he wanted to know if I had seen an old man with a stick pass
by (151).
In dispensing
advice to writers victimized by critics, Anthony Trollope displays both “To” and “Bare” infinitives in
his Autobiography:
If injustice be done him, let
him bear it. To do so is consonant
with the dignity of the position which he ought to wish to assume. To shriek and scream and sputter, to threaten actions, and to swear about the town that he has
been belied and defamed in that he has been accused of bad grammar or a false
metaphor, of a dull chapter, or even of a borrowed heroine, will leave on the
minds of the public nothing but a sense of irritated impotence. (Trollope 267).
The Spanish
philosopher, critic, and essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset, was a great stylist (in the
Spanish language). Here’s a translated example of how he closed his essay “The
Self and the Other,” collected in his book The
Dehumanization of Art:
To excel the
past we must not allow ourselves to lose contact with it; on the contrary, we
must feel it under our feet because we have raised ourselves upon it (204).
Note that
Infinitives may also be used, as sentence openers, in negative form:
Not to inhibit
her in any way, he nodded—to show his approval—and changed the subject.
Not to smile
respectfully at the very mention of the prefect’s name passes for recklessness
in the minds of the peasants of Franche-Comte (Stendhal 88).
Notice how a
master writer—Nathaniel Hawthorne[i] in
The Blithedale Romance—brings to bear
the full force of both ‘To’ and ‘Bare’ infinitives:
To bake, to boil, to roast, to fry, to stew—to wash, and iron,
and scrub, and sweep, and at our idler intervals, to repose ourselves on knitting and sewing—these, I suppose, must
be feminine occupations for the present (16).
And from
Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking:
To restrain
grief, to inhibit it, to bottle it up, is to fail to use one of God’s means for
eliminating the pressure of sorrow (196).
To depict a
tedious, static, and to some extent suffocating scene in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte uses a series of infinitives:
I did not like re-entering
Thornfield. To pass its threshold
was to return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and
spend the long winter evening with
her, and her only, was to quell
wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk—to slip again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform
and too still existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and
ease I was becoming incapable of appreciating (Bronte 12).
Or to project
a state of being and enchantment, as we read in Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek:
To live far
from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To take part in the Christmas festivities and, after eating and
drinking well, to escape on your own
far from all the snares, to have the
stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right: and to realize of a sudden that, in your
heart, life has accomplished it final miracle: it has become a fairy tale
(Kazantzakis 118).
Or to project a vision of life, as Walter
Pater does in his novel Marius, the
Epicurean:
To keep the
ye clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness, extending
even to his dwelling-place; to
discriminate ever more and more fastidiously, select form and color in
things from what was less select; to
meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more especially,
connected with the period of youth—on children at play in the morning, the
trees in early spring, on young animals, on the fashions and amusements of
young men; to keep ever by him if it
were but a single choice flower, a graceful animal or sea-shell, as a token and
representative of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoid jealously, in his way through the world, everything
repugnant to sight; and should any circumstance tempt him to a general converse
in the range of such objects; to
disentangle himself from that circumstance at any cost of place, money, or
opportunity; such were in brief outline the duties recognized, the rights
demanded, in this new formula of life (20).
Verbs express
action, change, and motion, and their abundant use —in infinitive form or
conjugated form— carry the narration with kinetic force. Although the
Infinitive form is much less energetic than conjugated forms, it still packs a
punch, despite the fact that it is used mainly to provide explanations or
justifications.
But a
resourceful writer will find creative ways in which to use the infinitive. Take
notice of how Professor Michio Kaku in his delightful book Physic of the Impossible begins his book with a series of questions
using the infinitive:
One day, would
it be possible to walk through walls? To
build starships that can travel faster than the speed of light? To read other people’s minds? To become invisible? To move objects with the power of our
minds? To transport our bodies
instantly through space? (IX).
The Perfect
Infinitive tense, being that it is formed with the auxiliary verb ‘to have,’ is
a sluggish form and should be avoided in scenes that require action; it may,
however, be used to project a serious, solemn tone:
To have done
so unless he intended to marry her was a terrible thing and damnable beyond
belief.
In this
section we’ve treated the infinitive as sentence openers only. But aside from
this function, the infinitive has a dozen other uses—some of which I will
mention—since they add strength and vitality to the narrative.
To express
orders or commands:
The witness is
to stay for further questioning.
You’re not to leave till I come back!
To express
purpose (with or without the optional ‘in order’):
He joined the
Navy to see the world.
We moved to
Tokyo to learn Japanese.
To connect a
clause to another clause (or other element) to express woe, sorrow, or
something bad by ante posing ‘only’:
Penelope
opened the envelope only to see a
rejection letter.
Felicia found
a gift certificate only to see it
had already expired.
Elizabeth
joined them again only to say that
her sister was worse and that she could not leave (Austen, Pride 24).
To qualify
nouns without using adjectives:
Columbia
University is the school to choose.
Adelly’s upper
hand is the hand to kiss.
Salome’s
vices were the sins to avoid.
Infinitives
may also be used as objects of prepositions:
Taking my own meals in my own
sitting room, I had nothing to do with the servants’ dinner, except to wish them a good stomach to
it all around, previous to composing myself once more in my chair (Collins 24).
The
infinitive may also modify an adjective:
Molly is
anxious to take her entrance exam.
And finally,
we cannot leave this section without mentioning a construct that professional
writers use to great advantage: an infinitive phrase introduced by the word for:
For the
First Lady to take a backseat was
embarrassing.
For the
Governor to admit it publicly was
the kiss of death.
[i] Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts,
where after his graduation from Bowdoin College in Maine, he wrote the bulk of
his masterful tales and major romances such as The Scarlett Letter.
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