I love our language, always have. It's a hodge-podge (German) scramble (Old Norse) of various influences (Latin), but because of all that historical 'fresh blood' it's playful, mutable, and charming (French, from Latin) to me (Old High German ('me' is Old High German, I'm an Old Drunk American)).
This love is both caused by and cause for a lifetime love of books. Little jabs of ink on boiled-out wood; new worlds, new thoughts, new understandings. Plus, hell, sometimes the words on a page are just fun; reading is a good time.
However, there is the occasional literary eyepoke one must suffer when digging between the covers. Such as this, which may be the most disappointing sentence I've ever read that was actually published in a book:
Here, the atmosphere was saturated with an homogenized odor of frying clams, grilling frankfurters, and baking pizzas, which, emanating from a few short-order stands, was carried in visible suspension on a greasy smog that formed an essential oil for the saccharine smell of spun-sugar candy, and that was pulsated over the entire area by shock waves of electronically produced rock and roll coming from competing public-address bellows in the various arcades.
Strangely enough the same book contains a sentence that works (on me at least) like a small poem:
Someday it would be a road with speed limits, directional signs, and median markings, and would be buttressed by acres of dirt fill supporting gas stations with strings of flapping pennants and bedroom cabins with elfin porches, gaudy trim, and tiny windows into which the sweep of headlights would steal at night and whisk across the gleaming backs of lovers.
The argument can be made they are both poor sentences. Both are run-ons, both have far too many adjectives, both are intended to provide 'atmosphere' as opposed to advancing the plot.
The first sentence in particular is a perfect example. Way too long for what little it provides, and almost every noun in it is preceded by an adjective (frying clams, visible suspension, essential oil, competing bellows), giving the read a staccato, first-draft feel.
But I think the second sentence works for me for the same reason the first one doesn't; us. The first sentence is lacking any direct reference to a person. The clam is fried, the air is full of greasy rock music, the arcades are, er, various. But nobody's eating the frankfurters, shouting over the music, or filling the arcades. It's a human world without humans.
In the second sentence, tho, we get the sweep of headlights across the backs of lovers. That's the image that gets to me. Not the lovers, but the sweeping lights at night. The image is immediate, yet nostalgic. Long roadtrips, cool clean sheets, familiar yet alien motel room, and the second most beautiful sound humans can make; the soft riverlike susurration of a distant interstate. Magic.
I love our language, always have.
Posts
