This Week’s Sentence 2

“I love your passion and drive, even if it is directed towards make-believe sports and war missions.”

This Week’s Sentence 1

In an attempt to keep up with some web-based writing, I’ve decided to choose a particularly powerful sentence every week, occasionally attempting to explain its appeal.

This is the first, from James Joyce’s “The Dead” (Dubliners):
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

The alliteration, repetition, and similar (in syntax and sound) phrasing contribute to the sentence’s poetic quality. The “their” lacks a clear antecedent in the sentence and in the story; in fact, I don’t believe it has an antecedent, but rather “their” refers to “the living and the dead.” This is the last sentence in the story, and it contains the entire story, as great sentences should.

The story is about the deadness in repetition. It’s hard to argue the deadness of this sentence, as it is alive with vibrant prose, but maybe the deadness can be argued by way of a suspect, perhaps inane, aspect in the sentence. I am not around snow often, but I’m sort of incredulous at the thought of this: “he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe.” I’ve never heard snow, nor (from what I understand about snow and cosmology) does snow fall through the universe; well it does, but in an unspecific way. Be it “falling faintly” or “faintly falling,” the sentence is only delaying the word “dead,” which doesn’t matter because it will come, eventually. And the “living” are included with the “dead,” and, indeed in the story, are “The Dead.”

Relation and Relations

My fiance is sending text messages to my phone while I’m in class, and we’re having something of a conversation. She is on campus for her cousin’s dance recital, which is in the Fine Arts Auditorium, and she has vehemently suggested that I attend after class. But my class goes from 1810h-2140h, and the recital starts at 1930h—I didn’t think I’d be able to make any of it. Luckily, there are around 47 acts, or so, to this recital; I can make some of it (which turns out to be most of it) after class, and with more luck still, her cousin doesn’t perform any of her routines (I can’t be sure that this is the right word for what these kids did, or even if it’s the accepted word for what these kids did) until after my class gets out (but that isn’t important here).

The classroom for this particular class is on the second floor of a building that relates to the FAA via an expanse of grass, approximately fifty yards, called (with glib grimness) The Green. I’m on the second floor; my fiance is on the first floor. What is more is that The Green lays on a 10-15 degree grade downward, and once inside the FAA, an aisle-strider would notice another comparable grade (you know, stadium-seating). I’m on the second floor; my fiance is on a much-farther-down first floor. What is more is that we’re staring in opposite directions, being entertained (to different extents) by what is in front of our eyes, which are staring (again) in opposite directions.

[You've got to understand that a recent, domineering strand of thought is that I'll be joined together with this woman in six weeks: one flesh. A fundamental hindrance for me with regards to relationships is a tangible understanding of experience (See: Autistic/Solipsistic)—I can't make total sense of the existence of others' experience. (And this other person, who has other experiences, who experiences experiences differently than I do, is joining me in flesh, which is how we experience physical things) (!).]

Bring yourself back to how my fiance and I are physically related. A straight, immaterial line around 115 yards could probably connect us. But it’d hit our backs first, as we’re back-to-back across this distance, and we’re at very different levels of height, facing different objects of interest. And I haven’t been in a dark FAA for a dance recital; nor have I ever witnessed a dance recital; i.e, I haven’t an idea as to what she’s experiencing. (Though she may have some vague, cerebral vision of what is happening in my classroom, I don’t really know, as I didn’t ask her. In fact, I haven’t brought any of this up to her, and she will most likely choose not to read this.) We’re both having singular experiences. (And I know, that last sentence incited a “Duh!” from you, but just take “singular” loosely, not as literal as normal—apply it to this situation).

But anyways, after the class finishes, I head straight (I say “straight,” but there is an erroneous, extraneous detour that is rather embarrassing) to the dance recital. An early-evening rain soaked the grass through which I tread. But I make it to the FAA, and obey her text of, “walk in the door, right to the right of the concession stand and walk all the way down til you see [my grandma] on your right.” I find them, and sit directly behind my fiance in the row behind their group, which includes my fiance, her mom, her aunt, her grandma, and a cousin.

Her family is here—that is, a lot of people I know are here. An uncanny feeling came fast upon me (it could be attributed to my having worked a 12-hour shift before such a long class). Because of the performers’ talent-level and the performances’ presentation, the recital has an air of television, and the group I joined acts like they were watching television. The situation wasn’t unlike removing us from my future grandmother-in-law’s living room and placing us in this pretty-full auditorium. It is fun, and I am sleepy. It is uncanny.

My sleepiness and bad eyesight, in addition to the incessant pointing of crowd-members to specify the kid they’d come to see to parties who couldn’t make out the children’s faces, provoked this fictionalized scene:

A father or adult or some man [it was important (rather, necessitated by realism) that it was a man] is at a dance recital, in which his daughter or a related child is performing, but he can’t figure out which one is the child he knows. At some point during the performance, he decides on one of the young children who will do, who looks similar enough. If he focuses on the wrong child during the extent of the performance, while thoughts of adoration and enjoyment of his relation encompass his mind, is anything lost? Effectually, he’s been romanced by a mirage. But that’s ok, right?

I thought about this for about half of one of the acts, and it seemed sufficiently significant or inventive for a piece of fiction I’d like to write. Then I gave up, going back to this strangely significant feeling of my own, real situation. I was with the girl I love, and I was happy. But I had to situate myself. I had to figure out why this moment I was in felt so meaningful in itself.

Not only was I let into a heretofore unexperienced experience, but I was able to jump into a place in which my fiance was already. She was there, living; I was elsewhere, living. And then I came into her place, and lived with her. But when I got there, she explained, “You didn’t miss anything. Chloe hasn’t performed yet, and they’ve all pretty much been the same.” That was it. I was able to experience this certain experience with her, but also, I was given access. By her saying that what I was experiencing was similar enough to what had preceded my attendance, I could superimpose what I knew to what I didn’t. This made the recital she viewed without me real, in a tangible way.

Obviously, most people don’t seem to need this sort of entrance, but I did. And the layers of significance erupted after inspection.

Questions and Responses – The First Two

 At the prompting of myself, a great friend sent me some questions of his origination. The hope was that I’d write: I did. And I’m titling these thoughts, originally enough, “Questions and Responses,” but you know that already.

Q: What is the potential for re-purposing or redesigning phrases that used to have a basis in reality, but that reality has faded away? For example, in this e-mail, I can CC or BCC someone. The CC stands for Carbon Copy, but carbon copy machines are long gone. What will this do to language?

R: The potential has been actualized, right? When phrases become re-purposed, they’re stripped of the initial meaning–as the reality in which the phrase was borne has also been stripped from the speaker. A replacement of meaning isn’t necessarily a danger; it just upsets the literal-minded curmudgeon, like myself. My favorite semi-example of this comes from the everyday speech of every cellphone user when one explains how he’ll “text you” later. That’s a slightly diguised noun, acting as a verb. But who cares? As long as points are being made, and thoughts communicated.

However, I do think there is a potential danger with a correlative problem. Though I’ve never read 1984, I know of Newspeak–defined here by Wikipedia: “the deliberately impoverished language promoted by state.” Media saturation has purged our speech of nuanced language, and with the extraction comes the loss of an ability to articulate big ideas. There is also a transference of meaning (of which your question spoke) or an overall reductive revision of our language: the vocabulary is shrinking, but ideas are not, leaving less words to bear more meaning. In an attempt to explain, I’ll cite the old joke/observation of the word “cool”: this word, in a not insignificant amount of speakers’ vocabularies, has been infused with every bit of positive meaning from complete indifference to the infinity of goodness (only vocal inflections–or worse, exclamation points– can be relied on for a somewhat nuanced meaning). With all of us audience to the same language–the language spoken by our televisions and radios and every other medium of communication–we forfeit words as they become antiquated by non-use. This is what makes 19th-Century novels or Faulkner difficult to read. There is a loss of words; I just hope we aren’t in turn losing ideas.

Q: Describe a super power that no one has ever had.

R: Super. Powerful. Singular. Incomparable.

Unaware Amanuensis

Living stories rely on active listeners, those willing to attend the story, to let it live again–now, perpetually–in themselves.

Reading Middlemarch – Through Book Two

Middlemarch must be the longest book I’ve started (Goblet of Fire and The Book of Basketball are the longest finished). And I am not being forced to read it. No longer am I slave to syllabi’s books, so I chose Middlemarch as the first book to read during winter break, which sounds better than “life” (which is more precisely the thing I’m in now, but that sort of melancholic talk is for another place). Over ten hours and only 200 pages in, I’m trudging but thoroughly enjoying the novel. I’ve been reading a bunch of women lately but not Victorian women–though this reads more like Faulkner than the women because of his tastes.

Really quickly, the novel’s subtitle is “A Study of Provincial Life,” and I think the adjective can be removed–not only because right now I think life is life, regardless of the micro-context, but because this woman was such a keen observer that the text is accurate, to my awareness. The text follows a few characters but ventures deep (sometimes like ten, small-print [I'm talking font size 8 or something] pages deep] into side characters’ lives and stories. With great focus Eliot does this.

Here are a few quotes to end this, and hopefully I’ll return here when I’m further in or done with the novel. But Lindsey told me that I don’t have to finish the book and that maybe I won’t. And she bought me the Harry Potter box-set for graduation–temptress. However, determination will endure…for all seven-hundred-and-ninety-five, bad-eyesight-inducing pages.

“Any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personæ folded in her hand.”

“Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing.”

“The element of tragedy which lies in the fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

All three are from the narrator, who I furtively imagine as Miss Mary Anne Evans (or George Eliot) as the conduit through which I receive this story.