Scan barcode
A review by e333mily
Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon
3.0
A wonderful premise (a collection of essays about the authors favourite sentences!) but I didn’t love this as much as Essayism. I suppose I just didn’t feel the same affinity for most of the sentences, even though Dillon’s analysis was brilliant, as always.
Favourites were Woolf, Didion, Barthes, Dillard, Malcom & Boyer. Oh—and his opening sentence, which lasts two and half pages!
-
“I went chasing eclipses: those moments of reading when the light changes, some darker lustre takes over, things (words) seem suddenly obscure, even in the simplest sentence, and you find you have to look twice, more than twice.”
“(Is that what I've been trying to do with all of these sentences? To read them in slow motion?…)”
“What have we got but our phrases, piling up?”
“Or maybe a short sentence after all, a fragment in fact, a simple cry, of pain or pleasure, or succession of same, of the same cries that is, compounded, and spoken at the last, in extremis, or another sort of beast entirely, whose unmeaning cry is just an overture, before the sentence sets in distinguished motion its several parallel clauses, as though it were a creature with at least four legs ("Every sentence was once an animal, says Emerson), so slowly but deliberately intent on its progress, so stately in its procession, so lavish in attention to the world it passes through, so exacting in the concentration it demands in turn, that—what? here already the sentence swerves, and although you are sure you've caught the sense the shape has begun to elude you, as if the animal in question were squirming or shaking itself loose of your grip, or turning to bite you and then take off, against all entreaties, into a mist of metaphor, where you must follow, closing the gate of this punctuation mark behind you; and on the other side everything is both less certain and suddenly, swimmingly, closer at hand: the sentence stops and looks around and starts comparing itself to the action of a drug, to the light-sucking lens of a camera or the slow apparition of an image (let's say a face) on photographic paper, to festive decorations enchained about a church, or a storm speeding across the lake towards the place where its writer is sitting, or, or, or the sentence, which considers itself very modern, has grown tired of such figural adventures, not to speak of the antiquary's accumulation of clauses and subclauses, so that you start to notice, start to notice certain acts of repetition (Repetition. But also. Interruption.) that give the sentence a faceted, crystalline quality it will always ever after possess, whether it wants to talk about sickness and health, about the sunlight outside Rome, a New York afternoon, a white boy who wants to be black, or the disappearing sun in daytime, even if it is short, even if it is long, even (especially) if it still aspires to its old elegance, the lofty periods, the plush vocabulary, on which subject, by the way, the sentence has been taking notes — a sample from the archive: slumgullion, man-drelled, greaved, eidetic, soricine, macula, fimmering, glop, exorb, chthonic, brumous, moil, ort, flygolding, chlamys — and keeping tabs, in case these riches come in useful, because who can say what the sentence will need or want in the future, what expansions or contractions it may endure or enjoy, what knowledge need to muster and deploy, whose speech to steal and celebrate, where to be heard the rhythms it needs to live, to live and let slip your overly attentive attention, interesting itself in things and bodies and abstractions that you no longer recognize and whose names and outlines you will have to entrust to the slippery sentence itself, which it turns out knows more than you do, knows when to seize on and worry the world and when to let go, as it's doing now, and go skittering away from you (its maker not its keeper), beating the bounds of its invisible domain.”
Favourites were Woolf, Didion, Barthes, Dillard, Malcom & Boyer. Oh—and his opening sentence, which lasts two and half pages!
-
“I went chasing eclipses: those moments of reading when the light changes, some darker lustre takes over, things (words) seem suddenly obscure, even in the simplest sentence, and you find you have to look twice, more than twice.”
“(Is that what I've been trying to do with all of these sentences? To read them in slow motion?…)”
“What have we got but our phrases, piling up?”
“Or maybe a short sentence after all, a fragment in fact, a simple cry, of pain or pleasure, or succession of same, of the same cries that is, compounded, and spoken at the last, in extremis, or another sort of beast entirely, whose unmeaning cry is just an overture, before the sentence sets in distinguished motion its several parallel clauses, as though it were a creature with at least four legs ("Every sentence was once an animal, says Emerson), so slowly but deliberately intent on its progress, so stately in its procession, so lavish in attention to the world it passes through, so exacting in the concentration it demands in turn, that—what? here already the sentence swerves, and although you are sure you've caught the sense the shape has begun to elude you, as if the animal in question were squirming or shaking itself loose of your grip, or turning to bite you and then take off, against all entreaties, into a mist of metaphor, where you must follow, closing the gate of this punctuation mark behind you; and on the other side everything is both less certain and suddenly, swimmingly, closer at hand: the sentence stops and looks around and starts comparing itself to the action of a drug, to the light-sucking lens of a camera or the slow apparition of an image (let's say a face) on photographic paper, to festive decorations enchained about a church, or a storm speeding across the lake towards the place where its writer is sitting, or, or, or the sentence, which considers itself very modern, has grown tired of such figural adventures, not to speak of the antiquary's accumulation of clauses and subclauses, so that you start to notice, start to notice certain acts of repetition (Repetition. But also. Interruption.) that give the sentence a faceted, crystalline quality it will always ever after possess, whether it wants to talk about sickness and health, about the sunlight outside Rome, a New York afternoon, a white boy who wants to be black, or the disappearing sun in daytime, even if it is short, even if it is long, even (especially) if it still aspires to its old elegance, the lofty periods, the plush vocabulary, on which subject, by the way, the sentence has been taking notes — a sample from the archive: slumgullion, man-drelled, greaved, eidetic, soricine, macula, fimmering, glop, exorb, chthonic, brumous, moil, ort, flygolding, chlamys — and keeping tabs, in case these riches come in useful, because who can say what the sentence will need or want in the future, what expansions or contractions it may endure or enjoy, what knowledge need to muster and deploy, whose speech to steal and celebrate, where to be heard the rhythms it needs to live, to live and let slip your overly attentive attention, interesting itself in things and bodies and abstractions that you no longer recognize and whose names and outlines you will have to entrust to the slippery sentence itself, which it turns out knows more than you do, knows when to seize on and worry the world and when to let go, as it's doing now, and go skittering away from you (its maker not its keeper), beating the bounds of its invisible domain.”