I am an almost writer.
Almost is almost a useless word. Sometimes it serves no purpose but to add rhythm, cadence, and two extra syllables to a sentence, like that guest we invite at the last minute to fill an empty seat at a dinner table. He doesn’t talk too much, won’t annoy anyone, and he disappears as quietly as he’s arrived, usually with an older person he’s kind enough to escort to the first taxi he is able to hail. And yet no word is useless or should be allowed to die simply because it casts a long shadow and perhaps is just that: all shadow. Almost is a shadow word.
A quick and random sweep through a few of my manuscripts reveals the following uses of almost: almost never, almost always, almost certainly, almost ready, almost willing, almost impulsively, almost as though, almost immediately, almost everywhere, almost kind, almost cruel, almost exciting, almost home, almost asleep, almost dead. She said to him: “Don’t even try” almost before his lips touched hers.
Did they kiss?
We don’t know.
Indeed, in Goethe’s Elective Affinities we have this: “The kiss her friend had given her and which she had almost returned brought Charlotte to herself.” (Translation: R. J. Hollingdale.)
We know what almost means. Dictionaries, however vaguely they define the word, agree on this: that almost means something between “short of” and “sort of.” Almost is an adverb, but it is also a stringer, a filler. Two extra syllables, like blush after makeup, just that requisite fuzziness, like ambiguity in an instance of candor. A halt in mid-speech, an extra tap on the piano’s pedal, a suggestion of doubt and degree, of resonance and approximation, where straight, flat surfaces are the norm. “By using almost,” says the writer, “I’m saying there is ‘less than’; but what I mean to suggest is that there is possibly ‘more than.’”
Yes, but did they kiss?
Hard to tell. Almost.
“We were almost naked” says we weren’t quite without clothes but couldn’t wait to be, which might easily mean “we couldn’t believe we were almost naked.” Almost naked is more charged, more erotic, more prurient than totally naked.
Almost is all about gradations and nuance, about suggestion and shades. Not quite a red wine, but not crimson, not purple either, or maroon; come to think of it, almost Bordeaux. Almost can be a polite, understated way of screening definitive certainties. It withholds the obvious and dangles it just long enough. Almost is about uncertainty soon to be dismissed but not quite dispelled. Almost is about revelation to come but not entirely promised—i.e., almost promised.
Almost mollifies certainty. In butchers’ language, it tenderizes certainty. It is anti-conviction and—by definition, therefore—anti-omniscience. Fiction authors use almost to avoid stating an outright fact, as though there were something blunt, crass, too direct in qualifying anything as definitely this or that. It is how novelists—as well as their characters—open up a space for speculation or retraction or for suggesting something that may not be but that poisons the mind of the jury.
Almost reminds the fiction writer that he is just that: writing fiction, not journalism. How can he know for certain whether X was really in love with Y? One could almost guess that he was. But who is to know? “That night, X caught himself almost thinking of Y without her clothes on.” Did he actually think of her naked, or is the writer trying to make the reader consider something that may never have been thought of at all? Almost speaks a writer’s reluctance vis-à-vis here-and-now, hard-and-fast, nuts-and-bolts, tooth-and-nail, bare-bones, in-your-face factoids.
Almost teases. It is not a yes or a no; it is almost always a maybe. Almost withholds definitive knowledge of things and suggests the provisional nature of everything found in a narrative, including, of course, the narrator’s own knowledge of the facts he’s been narrating. A cautious narrator uses almost almost as a way of vouchsafing his honest attempt to capture a particular essence on paper. Almost guarantees him an out. Almost not only allows an author to suggest that he might at any moment withdraw or revoke anything he’s put on paper, but it is also an elusive loophole that doesn’t always want to be noticed.
Almost is not the favorite word of all authors. One can imagine—though no one’s counting—that Hemingway was not a friend of almost. It’s not a word alpha males are disposed to use. It suggests timidity, not assertion; recession, not dominance.
But then there are writers who with an almost, or a presque in French, can suddenly illuminate a reader’s universe. Here is a sentence from La Princesse de Clèves: “She asked herself why she had done something so perilous, and she concluded that she had embarked on it almost without thinking.”
Had she really not thought of it, or had she thought of it but didn’t want to admit it? The author, Madame de La Fayette, herself doesn’t seem to know or want to know. She wants her character to seem a touch more guileless than might seem appropriate. After all, the Princesse de Clèves is a model of virtue.
But there is something else happening with the use of the word. It reflects a worldview where nothing is certain and where all things written can be rescinded or taken to mean the very opposite, or almost the very opposite.
I am an almost writer. I like the ambiguity, I like the fluidity between hard fact and speculation, and I may like interpretation more than action, which might explain why I prefer a psychological novel to a straightforward page-turner. One leaves things perpetually insoluble; the other is an open-and-shut case. Think of Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Ovid, Svevo, Proust. I turn to the word almost because it allows me to think more, to open more doors, to steer boldly and yet safely, to keep excavating and interpreting, to fathom the very recesses of the human mind, of the human heart, and of human desire. It gives me an out in case I have strayed too far.
There is not a page I write where the word almost doesn’t slip in to mollify and mitigate anything I say. It is my way of undoing what I write, of casting doubt on anything I write, of remaining uncertain, untethered, unmoored, unaligned, because I have no boundaries. Sometimes I think I am all shadow.
And perhaps I almost don’t know what the word almost really means.