Does 'sugar' mean air?

June 19, 2024 8:42 PM

In 'Seize the Day' written by Saul Bellow, here's a sentence. "He breathed in the sugar of the pure morning." I assume that the sugar means air although I can't find the meaning of that anywhere. Does he only want to say that he breathed the sweet air, doesn't he? Is this Bellow's original usage or a common expression for you native speakers? Thank you for always teaching me.
posted by mizukko to Writing & Language (13 answers total)

I don’t know if it’s Bellows’s original usage, and it’s not a common expression for any place I have lived in the US, but I would know exactly what he meant (“sweet peaceful feeling”) upon reading it.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:51 PM on June 19 [7 favorites]

I've never read nor heard anyone use that expression, but it's nice. :)
posted by Alensin at 8:53 PM on June 19 [4 favorites]

In the passage it seems like it is used poetically and could refer to the pure feeling of happiness the character feels at the start of the day.

It is not a use I have heard before, but I think native speakers would understand it either as a literal meaning - sweet air - or a poetic one - a pure and intense good feeling, like the taste of sugar.

I am not a Bellows expert, but I noticed that there are multiple references to air and breath in the book, and looking at these might help in understanding how he uses language.
posted by zippy at 9:05 PM on June 19 [7 favorites]

I think it could refer to a literal quality of the air or a more abstract/metaphorical sense of the morning being sweet, or both.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:05 PM on June 19 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I don't think it's intended literally in almost any way, and this is not a common idiomatic expression in English. People would think you were trying to be poetic if you said you were breathing in the sugar of the morning to anyone. The sentence is meant to describe someone greeting the morning by taking it in or absorbing it somehow, and the morning (or at least this particular morning) is wonderful for the person. So the verb "breathed" and the object "sugar" are both describing via metaphor how wonderful the morning is, and that it is being taken in by the person in a way that is totally natural and sort of fuses them as one with the notion of the morning itself.

Depending on how you wanted to portray the act of taking in, and how you wanted to portray the nature of the morning, you could use any number of combinations of verbs and nouns that don't make literal sense, but have a kind of descriptive meaning. "He drank in the nectar of the pure morning". "He devoured the ambrosia of the pure morning". And it doesn't necessarily have to be good - "He gagged on the sewage of the pure morning".
posted by LionIndex at 9:20 PM on June 19 [14 favorites]

Yes, it's metaphorical. It goes together with "the pure morning", which is also not exactly literal - there's no such thing technically as a morning that's pure or impure. But poetically it implies a morning that gives you the full ideal morning experience, maybe with fresh, sweet smelling air, beautiful light, some dewdrops glistening, some birds singing... the messiness or pollution of the rest of the day hasn't yet begun.
posted by trig at 12:01 AM on June 20 [3 favorites]

Definitely a metaphor; you will get confused looks if you try to say this conversationally. Virtually no native English speaker would say this outside of poetry, song, literature, and so on.
posted by demonic winged headgear at 1:49 AM on June 20 [1 favorite]

Best answer: In addition to the point about it being purely metaphorical, mentioned by several above, the senses of smell and taste are quite closely interlinked.

So when he says "He breathed in the sugar of the pure morning" I can practically smell the taste of that, if you get my meaning. There are a few ways a particularly pure morning might actually smell quite sweet.

I might classify it as a type of sensory imagery - which in my mind is a distinct thing from being purely metaphorical. Sensory imagery is going to be a far more embodied type of thing - a visceral type of response. It's mixing up two different, normally distinct, type of senses, yes. That's kind of the point of it. See for example synesthesia - this could be seen as a kind of example of that.

Regardless, "sugar" isn't just a kind of a strange synonym for "air". There's a lot more going on here than that.
posted by flug at 1:51 AM on June 20 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Clean air that feels good to breathe is sometimes called “sweet”. While describing air as sugar isn’t an idiom in English, “sweet air” to “sugar” is a small step and feels natural, though poetic, to me.
posted by tchemgrrl at 5:13 AM on June 20 [11 favorites]

The sweetness of early-morning air often perfumed by the scent of flowers or cut grass; how it smells and feels in the early part of the day before heat and other factors make it "ordinary" or sour or otherwise non-sweet... or, the sweetness of feeling that the whole day is in front of you and remains a gift to be opened, vs a day that's been overtaken by tasks and worries... It's a lovely turn of phrase.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 6:25 AM on June 20 [3 favorites]

"He breathed in the sugar of the pure morning."

Think of the prototypical golden morning...clean, fresh air...pure sunlight...the aroma, if you will, of dew. It's so sweet you can taste it. It's a wonderfully succinct metaphor.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:59 AM on June 20 [1 favorite]

(To be honest I think it's kind of a flat metaphor, since sugar has a pretty shallow, one-note flavor - and not a particularly delicious one in large quantities if it's on its own - whereas a fresh morning is like a complex symphony of wonderful smells! And the usual type of sugar people know - the white, ultra-processed, removed-from-nature stuff - is odorless and generally not very evocative on a sensory level. But then again sugar makes you hyper, and maybe the morning energized the guy breathing it in; or maybe something about the context makes the metaphor work better; or maybe Bellow had different ideas about sugar than I do. Or wanted to juxtapose nature with a modern processed foodstuff. Or ...)
posted by trig at 9:39 AM on June 20

Honey is a verb at times in garden writing as in the strong scent of heirloom sweetpeas honeyed the air. Sugared the air is a variation on that theme.
posted by y2karl at 6:37 PM on June 20 [2 favorites]