[Image: “Artifact,” by John E. Simpson.]

From whiskey river:

The Summer You Read Proust

Remember the summer you read Proust?
In the hammock tied to the apple trees
your daughters climbed, their shadows
merging with the shadows of the leaves
spilling onto those long arduous sentences,
all afternoon and into the evening—robins,
jays, the distant dog, the occasional swaying,
the way the hours rocked back and forth,
that gigantic book holding you in its woven nest—
you couldn’t get enough pages, you wished
that with every turning a thousand were added,
the words falling you into sleep, the sleep
waking you into words, the summer you read
Proust, which lasted the rest of your life.

(Philip Terman [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Last year’s Lake Wobegon Fourth of July (Delivery Day) was glory itself, sunny and not too hot, flags flying, drummers drumming, scores of high-stepping horses, smart marching units in perfect cadence, and Ben Franklin, Sacajawea, Ulysses S. Grant, Babe Ruth, Amelia Earhart, and Elvis marching arm in arm along with Miss Liberty majestic in sevenpointed crown and wielding her torch like a big fat baton, plus the Leaping Lutherans parachute team, the Betsy Ross Blanket Toss, a battery of cannons belching flame boomboomboom from the crest of Adams Hill and Paul Revere galloping into town to cry out the news that these States are now Independent, God Bless Us All, and Much Much More, all in all a beautiful occasion in honor of America, and the only sour note was that so few in Lake Wobegon appreciated how truly glorious it all was, since Wobegonians as a rule consider it bad luck to be joyful, no matter what Scripture might say on the subject, and so in the swirl of color and music and costumes and grandeur you could hear people complain about the high cost of gasoline and shortage of rainfall and what in God’s Name were they going to do with the leftover food.

(Garrison Keillor [source])

…and:

To learn even something as simple as to water the roots of a plant rather than its leaves was not to be dealt the harsh reality of cold hard fact, but rather to be let into a secret. In a garden, expertise was personal and anecdotal — it was allegorical — it was ancient — it had been handed down; one felt that gardeners across the generations were united in a kind of guild, and that every counsel had the quality of wisdom, gentle, patient, and holistic — and yet unwavering, for there was no quarrelling with the laws and tendencies of nature, no room for judgment, no dispute: the proof lay only in the plants themselves, and in the soil, and in the air, and in the harvest.

(Eleanor Catton [source])

They say — you know who they are; you may even be one of them yourself — that the optimum English-language sentence length lies somewhere south of 25 words. Beyond that, you’re severely trying your hypothetical reader’s comprehension, to say nothing of their patience…

But I do love encountering the occasional monster, especially in fiction. Proust’s (in)famous longest sentence — you can read it here, about halfway down the page and starting with the words, “Their honor precarious…” — is kinda hard to swallow; maybe it’s better in the original French (which I can’t read), but its English translation, at over 950 words of chunky abstraction, indirection, suspended clauses (some dependent, some not…), resists even the most patient taste. But coming upon such a thing in the 100- to 200-word range, especially in the hands of someone who “sees” the reader and not just themselves… well, it’s a source of great pleasure for me.

(As an “exercise” — so I excused the self-indulgence — I once wrote a story consisting of a couple short sentences bracketing a hideous giant sentence nearly 900 words long. You can read “Just So You’d Know” here, if you’re so inclined… although I don’t know why you would be!)

Possibly, one reason I’ve recently turned from writing to photography — the art of saying as much as possible, in as few words as you can — lies in a subconscious shame about this love of long sentences. I shouldn’t be enjoying this, I think; I should be bored by now, I should have turned the page two minutes ago.