Phew. These are getting more challenging, but I'm determined to keep going. Thank you for the parsing of this gigantic, meandering sentence. I'm thoroughly enjoying my crash progress through your early posts and exercises. I think the sentence I've written this time is very cumbersome, although I followed the syntax of the model closely. I know mine is more wordy, and I could tighten it up, if tightening up is what one should do when composing l-o-n-g sentences. So I didn't. I left it as is and will proceed to the next exercise.
My sentence:
The whole time I walked along that street I was aware of their eyes, which unlike yours did not speak of trust and goodwill, piercing me with their suspicions as if it was I who had come to disturb their comfortable complacencies that, though they had no desire to, they could have disturbed all by themselves if they would only truly open those eyes and recognise how freedom was theirs to grasp; the barriers that had been dismantled years ago were still firmly in place in their minds.
It is interesting how the descending protagonist and the ascending voice intersect or collide, I can feel the collision as it happens, with the protagonist already in the act of descending as he encounters the voice deep within the stairs. ‘Even as’ and the past tense ‘descended’ are positioned first then the active ‘to climb back into’ is placed second. So it feels like he meets the voice partway down the stairs. A fun alternate to the syntactic symbolism would have the voice climbing up then the protagonist enters into the voice and descends the stairs:
His voice, which like the rest of him was too large for those subterranean rooms, spilled out and up, as if climbing back into the bright afternoon, even as I entered the stairs and descended; it was mid-October, though it had nothing autumnal about it, and throughout the city, the grapes that hung ripe from vines still burst warm in one’s mouth.
This also places the protagonist in the sunshine first then entering the darkness. This doesn’t feel as strong as the original sentence but illustrates a different sequence.
I love the way you parse this and I love the grapes especially in this sentence-- they burst and are still, a kind of contradiction that supports the surprise that they are -- visceral all of a sudden in this headtrip of a staircase
Phew. These are getting more challenging, but I'm determined to keep going. Thank you for the parsing of this gigantic, meandering sentence. I'm thoroughly enjoying my crash progress through your early posts and exercises. I think the sentence I've written this time is very cumbersome, although I followed the syntax of the model closely. I know mine is more wordy, and I could tighten it up, if tightening up is what one should do when composing l-o-n-g sentences. So I didn't. I left it as is and will proceed to the next exercise.
My sentence:
The whole time I walked along that street I was aware of their eyes, which unlike yours did not speak of trust and goodwill, piercing me with their suspicions as if it was I who had come to disturb their comfortable complacencies that, though they had no desire to, they could have disturbed all by themselves if they would only truly open those eyes and recognise how freedom was theirs to grasp; the barriers that had been dismantled years ago were still firmly in place in their minds.
It is interesting how the descending protagonist and the ascending voice intersect or collide, I can feel the collision as it happens, with the protagonist already in the act of descending as he encounters the voice deep within the stairs. ‘Even as’ and the past tense ‘descended’ are positioned first then the active ‘to climb back into’ is placed second. So it feels like he meets the voice partway down the stairs. A fun alternate to the syntactic symbolism would have the voice climbing up then the protagonist enters into the voice and descends the stairs:
His voice, which like the rest of him was too large for those subterranean rooms, spilled out and up, as if climbing back into the bright afternoon, even as I entered the stairs and descended; it was mid-October, though it had nothing autumnal about it, and throughout the city, the grapes that hung ripe from vines still burst warm in one’s mouth.
This also places the protagonist in the sunshine first then entering the darkness. This doesn’t feel as strong as the original sentence but illustrates a different sequence.
I love the way you parse this and I love the grapes especially in this sentence-- they burst and are still, a kind of contradiction that supports the surprise that they are -- visceral all of a sudden in this headtrip of a staircase