 When
it comes to appreciation of writing, I'm a believer that less is more.
I prefer poetry and short stories to novels, and essays and short books
over long books, and I'm prone to copy down précis and favourite
passages and quotes from great books and then give the books themselves
away. When I find great ideas or expressions of emotion or word
pictures that contain only the number of words they absolutely need and
no more, I cherish them. So I got to wondering: What is the greatest
single paragraph ever written?
Initially I had thought to
separate this search into fiction and non-fiction, but as I pored
through my favourites I realized that some of the best paragraphs in
fiction summarize ideas or capture feelings or images that could have
easily come from a book of philosophy, or a travelogue. Some of the
best writing I've ever read is dialogue, however, and traditionally
each piece of a dialogue is afforded its own paragraph. So I decided
instead to look for the best maximum-200-word passage in any book or article I've read, regardless of how many paragraphs those words took up. That's fewer words than I've already written in this article, so it's pretty lean. And I decided to exclude poetry, because I thought that would be unfair to prose.
This
isn't a contest, and I'm sure we could never agree on a winner, but I'd
be interested in knowing what you think is the greatest passage of
prose you've ever read. A couple of years ago I reproduced two of my favourite passages, one by Frederick Barthelme (father of the brilliant advice to writers The 39 Steps), and the other by James Robison. Here are five more:
From The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram:
An
alder leaf, loosened by wind, is drifting out with the tide. As it
drifts, it bumps into the slender leg of a great blue heron staring
intently through the rippled surface, then drifts on. The heron raises
one leg out of the water and replaces it, a single step. As I watch, I,
too, am drawn into the spread of silence. Slowly a bank of cloud
approaches, slipping its bulged and billowing texture over the earth,
folding the heron and the alder trees and my gazing body into the
depths of a vast breathing being, enfolding us all within a common
flesh, a common story now bursting with rain.
From Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott:
My
young son Sam saw his first dead person last month. Two friends of ours
had a baby who died, and we went to spend the morning with them and the
body of their son. He was five months old and weighed eight pounds,
down from the ten he weighed at birth. He wore a white baptismal gown,
and lay in a big basket on top of his crib, covered with flower petals
from the waist down, white as a rose. There were flowers and shrines
everywhere, statues of the Buddha and pictures of his Holiness the
Dalai Lama (because his mother is a Buddhist) and of Jesus (because his
father is a Christian). Brice looked like a small, concerned angel from
someplace snowy. None of us, including Sam, could take our eyes off
him. He looked like God.
"You what? my relatives asked when I
mentioned this. "you took Sam to see what?", as in, What will you take
him to see next? Brain surgery?
Sam brought the baby two
presents that morning, which he laid in the basket. One was a ball, in
case you get to play catch on the other side. The other was a small
time-travel car, from Back to the Future. Brice's parents and I are
still scratching our heads over that one.
From Straw Dogs by John Gray:
For much of their history and all of prehistory, humans did not see
themselves as being any different from the other animals among which
they lived. Hunter-gatherers saw their prey as equals, if not
superiors, and animals were worshipped as divinities in many
traditional cultures. The humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves
and other animals is an aberration. Feeble as it is today, the feeling
of sharing a common destiny with other living things is embedded in the
human psyche. Those who struggle to conserve what is left of the
natural environment are moved by the love of living things, biophilia, the frail bond of feeling that ties humankind to the Earth.
The mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment.
It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth -- and thereby to
be the agent of its own destruction. What could be more hopeless than
placing the Earth in the charge of this exceptionally destructive
species? It is not of becoming the planet's wise stewards that
Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter.
From Cooker by Frederick Barthelme:
I'm left there in the tent with my wife. I say "I'm acting up, I guess".
"A little."
"But that's acceptable, right? Now and then?"
"It's fine," she says.
"It's by way of complaint, huh? So we're back where we started from."
"Yep"
"It's
not a vague complaint in my head," I say. "It's just that it covers
everything. There are too many things to list. You start listing things
that are wrong, and you either make them smaller and sort of less
wrong, or you go on forever. You got forever?"
"Sure."
She gets
up on her knees and twists around so she can lie down on her back
alongside me. She takes my right hand in my left. "See there? We're not
completely gone. We're OK. We've just got to take it one thing at a
time. We've got to go binary on this."
From Spots by Frederick Barthelme:
I
waited another couple of minutes, then started on a walk toward the
highway and the beach. The air was peculiar, the way it just hung,
motionless, drifting off the water, and the only sound was the faint
hiss of little breakers running over rock jetties. There weren't any
cars on Highway 90, and only one streetlamp burned about 150 yards down
the road. I stood on the corner in front of the condos and looked up at
our place, the dark bedroom where Cheryl was sleeping, then walked out
into the middle of the empty highway and crossed to the beach side
where the sand was gritty under my shoes, then came back, looking all
around, soaking up everything. With the lights out things seemed to
have lost their power. It was like nothing was holding anything, the
resistance was gone, that little pressure that's always against you,
obliging you, keeping you in place.
What do great literary passages have in common? They provoke -- your senses, your mind, your emotions. They transport you, engage you, teach you. They resonate with things that are rattling around in your head or your heart. They make you say "Damn I wish I had written that, that I could write like that". They mean something to you, make you want to call up the author and say I get that. They move you, change you, the way you see or think or feel about the world.
They
are crafted when the head and the heart and the senses of the writer
are working as one, when the writer's heart is open and her senses are
open and her mind is aware of and painstakingly and articulately
transcribing exactly what she feels and senses and thinks, what her
characters are telling her. The mental state that enables this can be
hard to achieve, and it's draining work. It doesn't come from waiting
for inspiration or one's muse, but from practice and from openness and
from great mental self-discipline. And from paying attention.
The other day artist Andrew Campbell sent me a passage from a novel called The Strandloper
by Alan Garner. I've ordered the book, but I already sense that it has
some of the magical qualities listed above that produce great
literature. The passage is a lot more than 200 words, but even without
knowing what the novel is about the prose is irresistible:
He
looked up through the empty crown. Above it a kestrel fluttered, its wings blurred, its tail curved. He pursed his lips and
made clicking sounds. “What’s to do? said Esther.
“Cush, cush; cush a cush.”
“What is it?”
“A windhover. Cush-a-cush.”
“It’s nobbut a brid,” said Esther. The kestrel
swerved out of sight. William stood up, and pulled Esther to her feet,
and they left the oak.
He took her by the hand, and they walked down to the mere, the dog
close behind. The shower was passing: a drizzle so fine that the drops
hung in the
sun.
“See at the rainbow!” An alder grew from the bank, its trunk lying in the mere, and the
rainbow plunged into the branches of its head, snared in a willow.
“I’ve never been so near,” said Esther.
She was whispering. “See at it.”
“Eh up. Cush-a-cush.” The kestrel was above the rainbow. It shut its wings and stooped into
the alder, but they did not see it rise again. It was lost in the dazzle of colour.
“I’ve never been so near.” Said Esther.
She went along the willow.
“It’ll shift,” said William.
“It will. As good as goose skins.” But he went to
her, by the alder. The dog tested each step of the trunk. They sat in the branches.
“I told you.” The rainbow was out on the water.
“But it was here,” said Esther.
“Here’s where it was.” They held each
other.
“Eh, but Shick-Shack. Me?”
“What’s all this reading for?” she said.
“It’s Yedart.”
“I know that.”
“He’s learning me.”
“But what’s it for?”
“It betters you.”
“How?”
He shrugged, “Yedart says.”
“Yedart says’! Ay,. And Yedart does.
You’ve been all nowtiness and discontent since you started this caper.”
“I like it.”
“But what does it mean? What you were reading back
there.”
“Anyone can do it.”
“Well, I can’t.”
“Yay. But you can.”
He caught hold of her wrist, and wrote with her hand in the water. I. Do. Love. Thee. She pulled her hand clear. The water shimmered, and was stilled.
“I do love thee,” he said.
“And I do love thee,” she said. “But
you’ll get that slutch off first. I’m not sitting up with any crow trod gowf tonight.”
He tried to kiss her. “No. Not while you get that slutch
off.”
“I do love you, Het.” She laughed, and splashed water at him. She reached down to scoop more,
but her fingers caught in the hardness of the mud. She took it, and put it into
his hand.
“There. Don’t say I never give you
nothing.” It was a stone; a black stone, flecked with red, part bubbled as a
brain, part rough as frost; and all stuck about with clear crystals that winked in the light. He held it in his palm.
“It’s a swaddledidaff,” she said.
“From the end of the rainbow.”
“Our swaddledidaff, From me to thee.” The rainbow was gone.
___________________________
And the East sent a rainbow to the mere of the font. He danced in the
rainbow, and about the trees, in the drums and the song and he danced at the font for the Man
in the Oak and the Crown of Glory, but the eyes were blind. He left the drumming and the song and danced into Silence. The paint
and bright sweat melted to air.
Through the Silence came the voice of Tundun, and he danced, beyond
mulla-mullung. He danced the Evening Star. His step was with the voice of Tundun. He
danced the Evening Star to bring the warriors home, and made the path of Murrangurk’s
five ways. He danced the Evening Star for the blind eyes in the crown; and the eyes of the glass
opened, and Nullamboin looked at him.
The church was light and the scent of oak and the scent of bwal. From
the South door lay the bush of Beangala to the sea. Tundun and the Silence were All
and One. Strandloper entered into his bone country. The wave bore his right foot
and the earth his left. He walked with Binbeal, son of Bunjil. There came an eagle.
Here is the start of the Dream,
And how the sweet sorrow is sung.
So what's your nomination for the greatest passage ever written? |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
