Tuesday, December 27, 2011
An Exemplary Sentence
This from Joan Didion's new BLUE NIGHTS:
You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.
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5 comments:
The entire book is loaded with sentences like this, sentences that breathe life into a deathly sadness.
I've just ordered this book along with The Year of Magical Thinking. Cannot wait to receive them through the mail. Thanks for sharing this line...
The title of your post made me instantly recall this one from Claudio Magris's Danube:
In the end this is all there is, the backward glance that perceives the nothingness of it all.
page 206.
luscious.
Hello Mark! I've been teaching Didion this quarter, but haven't read Blue Nights yet. Thanks for sharing and reminding me that sentences are at the heart of all of it. My students often read only haphazardly; I'm also teaching a class on blogging, and it's been a struggle to get them to read more than one page of a blog that is not based on visual images!
Brenda
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