Here is another sentence tasting. This one is 4000 words long, but it is divided in ten parts.
I
Sentences do not pass through you like trains through a station. Ideas and words and strings of words come together in your mind, they have affairs, and they give birth to sentences through your tongue and your lips and your teeth and your fingertips.
Everything you hear is like something you’ve heard before. Every sentence you read reminds you of previous sentences and evokes feelings you had about those sentences. Sometimes the resemblance is weak and general, like a face in the crowd that is like other faces you’ve seen in other places. Sometimes the resemblance is strong and deliberate, calling forth all the memories you have of an old friend, or like someone you have not known but have long wanted to meet. Sometimes a sentence takes familiar bits and puts them together in a new way that is like someone you’ve never known before but suddenly feel like you have wanted to know all your life. And when you now meet, you are carried away, captured by the fame – no, you capture it and you carry it away. And make a new meaning.
And then life moves on. With or without you, it moves on. But you still are still pregnant with this sense. And you may dwell with it in palaces or in flophouses, on clean silk or on reeking cotton, or both by turns, but it is always yours, in paradise and in exile.
II
Have you ever read “By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept”?
Have you ever read By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept? Continue reading
Sesquiotica 