Sentences

You can’t judge a book by its cover, except … 

The cover of Reading Style – A Life in Sentences by Jenny Davidson displays the medley of chocolate bonbons I’ve always hoped I’d find in a magical box of perfect confection. In the book, Davidson narrates her sweet life as a reader, and she was/is a dauntingly ambitious reader. In addition to the frequently cited masters of prose (Austen, Flaubert,Fielding, Burgess, Nabokov, and Eliot), she cites works by Lionel Shriver, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and my newly discovered favorite stylist, Helen DeWitt among many other masters of the craft.

If I had any success as a teacher peddling significant books to very bright and savvy adolescents it was in taking time to read novels and short stories sentence by sentence, and plays line by line. I would trot out J.D. Salinger’s collection, Nine Stories, near the start of the sophomore year, goading my classes into reading the widely admired “For Esme with Love and Squalor”, keeping track of voice and language. That’s more than enough to keep track of as even the most unadorned of sentences has weight. 

“Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.”

That’s Esme’s request of the writer on a rainy afternoon in a tea shop. 

The scene and voice change as the narrator is pulled into the war, allowing the observation, “She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of exclamation points and inaccurate observations.”

I leave these and the subsequent examples without comment; they are yours to do with as you will.

A less familiar story, “Down at the Dinghy” offers this description of the central character. “Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was – in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces – a stunning and final girl.”

OK, kids, “final”?

I have a short list of sentences I’ve grabbed as I read, some profound and some piercing. 

We also read Slaughterhouse Five, in which Vonnegut offers, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

A few for your consideration:

“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”

Kate Chopin – The Awakening.

“The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me, all in the right order.”

Toni Morison – Beloved

“At the still point, there the dance is.”

T.S. Eliot – The Four Quartets

The novella, The English Understand Wool, by Helen DeWitt is almost too rich to read before going to bed. Explaining what she means by suggesting that the English understand wool, the Germans understand precision, the Swiss understand discretion, the (seventeen year old) narrator observes:

“When I speak of these forms of understanding, I do not mean that they are instantiated in every individual of a nation, a culture. I think of this thing which in France is taken so seriously, the terroir, the importance of a particular soil in conjunction with the water, the sun, the aspect of the land, and how this affects the grape.”

“In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.”

Well, it’s the first line of Scene 1 in Act I of The Merchant of Venice. Curtain up. Here we are. Lots of very dramatic stuff ahead and at least two soliloquies that are quoted at the drop of a hat – 

Shylock’s “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian?”

Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strained, etc”

The first line, spoken by Antonio, is often overlooked. The play is about Shylock, or Portia (tests of suitors, etc), right? Let’s get into the pound of flesh. But … What if the play is about Antonio?

Portia is a judge; Shylock is a moneylender. Antonio is the merchant of Vence. It’s his flesh at risk, of course, but what if in addition, the play is set into motion by Antonio’s willingness to pledge a pound of himself  in order to secure a loan necessary to fund frat-bro Bassanio’s wooing of Portia? 

Portia, by the way, has a grand old time mocking the suitors who do not have the cleft chin and chiseled features rocked by Bassanio, a good old, fairly dim, boy willing to see Antonio sliced and diced if it means he has a shot at Portia.

As Hamlet reminded Polonius when asked what he was reading, “Words, words, words.” It really is all about the words after all, isn’t it?