I’ve heard it said that typing out a whole, admired, book is a good exercise for writers. I’ve never done it. But I have typed out a few long and admired sentences. Sentences, as Blake had it, that “see the world in a grain of sand.” Although, these are pretty large grains.
If you read them out loud, don’t forget to breathe.
Enjoy.
Around the great stadium the tenement barrens stretch, miles of delirium, men sitting in tipped-back chairs against the walls of hollow buildings, sofas burning in the lots, and there is as sense these chanting thousands have, wincing in the sun, that the future is pressing in, collapsing toward them, that they are everywhere surrounded by signs of the fated landscape and human struggle of Last Days, and here in the middle of their columned body, lank-haired and up close, stands Karen Janney, holding a cluster of starry jasmine and thinking of the blood-storm to come.
––Don DeLillo, Mao II
Did he go back to the river behind our house, one late May day earlier that year, in which we bolted from the school bus and rushed into the house, changing into our thrift store swim trunks and beatdown, fire-sale shoes, running across the land our broke parents could just afford to rent, across the beaver dams that created bridges over the swamps, and through the towering cattails, diving headlong into those green waters, surging underwater, the bottom lit by a blazing sun, and up the shore on the other side, scrambling in the mud and loose stones, up under the bridge, where the big rocks were, and climbing up together, he and I, laughing, and jumping right back in, into the deep, and both swimming down side by side, holding the biggest rocks we could find to stay at the bottom, trying to outdo each other, our legs caught up in the current, flailing loosely behind us, not unlike, I imagine, his legs currently flailing after catapulting off of that Lincoln, and did he land there in that memory, a nice place to be for anyone, looking at me underwater, me looking at him, two brothers together, almost one person, him somehow knowing in this memory as he is flying through the air above and then impacting face down in a silty dry ditch, facing the same breathing issue under that bridge in that water in this death memory as he was now, roadside, hidden in that ditch by sage and crunchy tall grass, and back there in the river with me, inside his bruised and dying brain, as the electrical signals fired more and more details so that he could forget his body was ravaged and busted and dying and pushed down into that dust exactly like the victim he was, that of an automobile massacre, and there, in his memory, does he look over and say goodbye to me, as I never will get to say to him, me, still dreaming about him all these 25 years later, getting so angry with him because he’s not here to see how beautiful and terrible this world is, but mainly it’s that I’d like to tell him in this maybe-memory that he’s having as he dies in this ditch that it’s not the big stuff that I want to show him, it’s having a beer and talking about nothing, fucking nothing, on any day of the year, just to see his face again, and maybe hear him laugh, a laugh, which 25 years later I have completely forgotten, and that’s okay too, that’s what happens, right, you forget things, change things, but I can’t change that he has died, will die, will always be dead in that ditch and even though I know it’s impossible because we burned his body up like fucking cordwood and buried him in the backyard, I hope that his synapses are still firing somewhere out there and he’s under that water, reaching over to poke me in the ribs to try to get me to let go, and I’m poking him back, and he’s glorious, like the glow of halos in stained glass from European churches and that he’s never dead, not dead, never could be dead, no not this kid, this fucking beam of pure light.
––Nicholas Dighiera, “The Tree,” forthcoming soon in Riverteeth
Needless to say, the link to my father was never so voluptuously tangible as the colossal bond to my mother’s flesh, whose metamorphosed incarnation was a sleek black sealskin coat into which I, the younger, the privileged, the pampered papoose, blissfully wormed myself whenever my father chauffeured us home to New Jersey on a winter Sunday from our semi-annual excursion to Radio City Music Hall and Manhattan’s Chinatown: the unnamable animal-me bearing her dead father’s name, the protoplasm-me, boy-baby, and body-burrower-in-training, joined by every nerve ending to her smile and sealskin coat, while his resolute dutifulness, his relentless industriousness, his unreasoning obstinacy and hard resentments, his illusions, his innocence, his allegiances, his fears were to constitute the original mold for the American, Jew, citizen, man, even the writer.
––Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography
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