To thank you for being with me, falling in love with the sentence over and over, marveling at how it makes meaning.
We’ve walked so far, and there’s so much more, and more of the same. Repetition never hurt anyone. It moves things into the body, to your pulse, to your fingers where they will flow on the page and become a poem, a story, an essay, or a single sentence burning bright, so bright it fills something, perhaps the heart, or we listen to the heart as it asks us to move into the mystery beyond or beneath it.
“The imagination,” wrote the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, “is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.”
A beautiful sentence to close the year from the opening of the poem, “Royal Coachman on a Barbless Hook,” by Jude Nutter, from her collection, Pictures of the Afterlife.
Summer evenings at the kitchen table,
on my grandfather’s heavy Remington Portable,
its round keys glowing like bone buttons, I wrote:
sky, with the light in its arms, and the dusk’s
white dew because sooner or later most of us
sit down and gamble everything
on words.
May 2023 find the best in us.
Thank you.
Nina
Thank you so much, Nina! I am so grateful for your Substack, and this laser focus on sentences. I have one for you, one of many in this story that shine like a firmament of suns:
This second-rate raya had just enough time on his third-rate throne to build a fourth-rate fortress on the banks of the Pampa River, to put a fifth-rate temple inside it, and to carve a few grandiose inscriptions into the side of a rocky hill, before the army of the north came south to deal with him.
From “A Sackful of Seeds,” by Salman Rushdie, in The New Yorker, 12/12/22. What an inventive poet of a writer! His command of language makes me swoon.
Have an amazing pause, happy everything, and thank you for your energy and attention!!
Love this! Thank you, Nina for all your inspiration.
Ginny Horton