Wow, fiction works! (a wood parody)In closing, I direct your attention to a perfect sentence. Yes, they exist. One of the pleasures of my profession is discovering these elusive unicorns in the books sent for my review. I read half a score of books each week; I am a fast reader, and generally underwhelmed by what passes for good writing these days. But once in a while, among the gaudy offerings, I come across one of those luminous sentences that make the soul vibrate. I share with you a recent find:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
I can’t remember exactly where I read it—it was a busy day, as I was buying a new typewriter and handing in the manuscript of my latest book, The Janus-Faced Chimera: Missives from a Reader—and Writer!—of the Prose Arts. The provenance of the sentence is not the issue; its terse, fierce beauty most assuredly is. Who is this brown fox, and how did he get so fast? To what can we attribute the lethargy of the canine—is it some onerous matter of faith or a vast existential conundrum? Where is the fox headed, into what gaping darkness? Indeed, where are we headed? For we are all of us implicated here. This is a sentence that insists upon itself and at the same time points to the greater mysteries, as if there were some secret order determin ing every letter. What more can we ask of art?
More from Harper's here.
Posted by Morgan Meis on 3 quarksdaily
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