Sentences

I love sentences. I mostly enjoy reading because of sentences. Plot is important. Character development is a necessity, but its the grace of a beautiful sentence that makes the act of reading a nourishing experience.

None of the sentences in the previous paragraph are great sentences (as I'm sure you already knew). I don't think I'll ever write a great sentence, at least, not on the level I'm speaking of. I'm not here to explain what I think makes a great sentence. Such cerebral nonsense is best left to dusty English Departments. We need no knowledge of syntax or grammar to recognize a great sentence when it spits on our face. Hell, you don't even need to know what all the words mean sometimes.

Great sentences are syllabic epiphanies . They conjure emotions and memories. They connect us to the real make believe. A great sentence is a waltz of words. Fat words, small words, shy words and tall words seemingly disconnected, until they meet and begin to dance. Great sentences must be spoken aloud, for they are too raucous to be contained in the mind. A great sentence electrocutes brain waves. A great sentence reads like a photo album.

I could go on, but I won't. Here are a few (very few) favorites. You tell me if you get what I mean...

"He sent it to the government, accompanied by numerous discriptions of his experiments and several pages of explanatory sketches, by a messanger that crossed the mountains, got lost in the measureless swamps, forded stormey rivers and was on the point of perishing under the lash of despair, plague and wild beasts until he found a route that joined the one used by the mules to carry the mail."

"Mother died today, or was it yesterday."

"His people had once been great makers of songs so that everything they did or heard became a song."

"In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahmin's son, grew up with his friend Govinda."

"Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

"It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody."

"The citadel was dark and the heroes were sleeping. When they breathed, it sounded like they were testing the air for dragon smoke."

"Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin."



Each tells a tale of its own entire. Now if we could only learn to speak this way all the time.