Three More Life Sentences


So, I collect sentences.
Here are three more that keep gifting insight.

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence. 
- Wendell Berry, What Are People For?

Berry's book
I read this years ago, and go back to it whenever I hear outside or start to feel inside the logic that says, you are doomed to fail, so, don't. Don't speak. Don't act. Don't protest. Don't fail. Don't resist. Don't try. This, says Berry, is the voice that destroys a sense of nobility. It makes doing the result of the cold calculus of winning. Why vote? My candidate won't win. Why argue? My argument won't win the day. Why speak up? My voice will be swamped. Berry asks us to contemplate that the answer, like the question, is radically individualistic. The sentence is alive. The interjection I think quietly sets up the stakes involved for the individual actor. The modifier namely bids us remember that it is the individual who is in the balance. Like Finn in the new Star Wars. And then there is the deft insertion of the word acquiescence to punctuate the flourish. Etymologically, there is, I think, no connection to essence, in the sense of to be. But phonically there is. As a whole, the sentence reminds me that not doing is also doing, and that going silent can be a death.

Maya Angelou
And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of plowing.
- Maya Angelou

The sentence is remarkable for many reasons, but what I admire most is the pronoun this in front of the noun weather. Choosing the vague this contravenes the advice of the style guides I learned from. Be concrete, be specific, they taught. In this case, though, a list of concrete, specific weather words (good, bad, cold, sunny, rainy, calm, wintry) would only work against Angelou's purpose, which seems to be that what matters is now, and that now is on the move, falling away, made of perishable minutes. It is as vain to try to house passing time as it is to yoke the weather to an adjective. This sentence makes it impossible to complain about the weather—as if we would always be able to complain about the weather. Which is what those dead folks have just learned.
Boyhood Island


Within a couple of minutes, the whole scene had evaporated, and the pitch was empty.
- Karl Ove Knausgaard, Boyhood Island

You could try to write a sentence to try to capture the sad way that time makes childhood vanish. Or you could choose the verb evaporated, and suggest to the reader that we are made of tears.







You might also be interested previous life sentences. :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughed ab
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit
Read more