In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
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Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#2[deleted]
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#3My favorite long sentence is from “The Silent Eyes of Time,” by Algis Budrys: “He was already, however, beginning to think of DC-3s, and then of tall white cruise ships, and of a narrow winding street of steps that led to the house where they played music on Victrolas with hand-joined, beautifully varnished boxes, nickelled cranks, and fluted horns like Morning Glories confused by the light from the great chandeliers and thus mistakenly uttering praise of a new day.”
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#4“From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.” — Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner
As The Edge builds a wall of sound, Faulkner builds a wall of words.
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#5i find it amusing that the essay alludes to the succinct-sentence-prescribing style guide, the elements of style, written by strunk & white (of charlotte's web fame), whose affiliiated institution also produced thomas pynchon, a writer whose meticulous verbosity may know no bounds but also produced some fascinatingly long sentences.
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#6My experience with writing long and complicated sentences is that I don't have the skill to write good ones, and neither do most people. Instead, I follow the rule of thumb that my college writing instructor taught: aim for an average of about 20 words, vary your sentence length, and try to say what needs to be said and no more.
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#7Dylan Thomas was always good for a few of these.
“Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.” - A Child’s Christmas in Wales
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#8THAT praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.
-- Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#9“The light had now completely failed and he stared over Sr. Bustamente’s shoulder past the curtain into a graveyard darkness, stabbed by flashes of torchlight like heat lightning, but the vendors had lowered their voices, the children had stopped laughing and crying while the diminished audience sat slackly and bored yet patient before the dark screen, suddenly illuminated, swept, by silent grotesque shadows of giants and spears and birds, then dark again, the men along the right-hand balcony, who hadn’t bothered to move or come downstairs, a solid dark frieze carved into the wall, serious, moustachioed men, warriors waiting for the show to begin, for a glimpse of the murderer’s bloodstained hands.” — Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#10“We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head."
-- William H. Gass