There’s something mysterious about the “little moons”, as Erasmus called them. The moon has represented, in various traditions, creation and destruction, rebirth, eternity, the feminine, time, marking time, mystery, the night, and secrets. And so has the parenthesis. The convex-concave curves of the open and closed parentheses cup something said by the way, whisperings, secrets mouthed into the reader’s ear, mumbled under the author’s breath. For Renaissance writers, punctuation belonged to the visual-grammatical and the spoken-rhetorical. Headmaster and pedagogical author Richard Mulcaster categorizes parentheses as “creatures to the pen and distinctions to pronounce by”. They’re amphibian in striking out a precarious existence as belonging to both the water of the spoken and the land of the seen. The (two) visual walls make meaning discrete, even as they remain permeable enough for the eye to slip in and out. You can’t overlook a bracket. Yet you can also read right through it. How does one read a bracket? How does one read it out? Mulcaster suggested that “the words enclosed by them are to be pronounced with a lower and quicker voice than the words either before or after them.” Both visually and aurally, then, what’s inside nestles safely between parenthetical palms, protecting tender expressions of intimacy.