Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

My English homework today concerned third conditional clauses, the kind that separate those who have actually read a book from those who rely on predictive text. The exercises were, to put it mildly, elementary. I finished them in the time it took my mother to boil water for tea.

Afterwards, I reread the opening of *Wuthering Heights*. Brontë deploys the third conditional with surgical precision: "It would *have* been..." Not "would of," not "would have *did*," but the correct subjunctive form, used to convey a world that exists only in counterfactual regret. It is, I think, the literary equivalent of a perfectly constructed clockwork mechanism: every gear meshes, every clause resolves exactly where it must.

If the student who sits behind me in English class could spell "their" correctly for one consecutive week, I would consider the education system partially redeemed. But the conditional, alas, is not third-person singular. It is a ghost of a possibility that never was.

-- GV