Anders stood, the pain in his hand muted by the intensity that had seized him, and he felt himself trembling, a vibration so faint as barely to be perceptible, but then stronger, like a dangerous winter chill, like freezing outdoors, unsheltered, and it drove him back to his bed, and under his sheets, and he lay there for a long while, hiding, willing this day, just begun, please, please, not to begin.
Mohsin Hamid, “The Face in the Mirror” (The New Yorker, May 16, 2022)
My good friends send me, not flowers or jokes or chocolate, but dazzling sentences. “Have you seen this? Incredible sentences!” wrote my friend in a recent email. She attached a photo of a page from the story. And of course, I rushed to find it, and I had to hurry because her excitement was contagious, like an electric charge, like an urgent shrill siren, and the next thing I knew I was immersed in the long sentences of Mohsin Hamid.
Why bother with long sentences? Seems like the world is having an intense love affair with emails and texts. It devours short. Concise. (Well, right there is a reason to cheer for the longer sentence, ie. Contrarianism.)
Long sentences are like open fields, providing a big stretch of text for rhythm and sound, which is another way of saying music. Music enters the reader’s body, delivering a delicious experience at the cellular level. Long sentences hold you, grip you, demand your attention, and it’s necessary to carefully follow them along as they twist and turn. Maybe they cultivate a longer attention span (one can only hope). Have I won you over? (A long time ago, I thought of starting a Slow Language Movement).
Josephine Miles, the first woman to gain tenure in the English Department at Berkeley, wrote in her book, Style and Proportion: The Language of Prose and Poetry, “Prose proceeds forward in time by steps less closely measured, but not less propelling, than the steps of verse.”
The Steps
When you have a long sentence like Hamid’s the first thing to do is locate all the independent clauses, those clauses that can stand alone as a sentence. In Hamid’s sentence there are:
1. Anders stood
2. He felt himself trembling
3. It drove him back to bed and under his sheets
4. He lay there for a long while
One way to grow a sentence is by connecting independent clauses with conjunctions or connective words. Hamid uses “and.”
He made the sentence even longer by adding modifiers to each independent clause. So:
1. Anders stood, the pain in his hand muted by the intensity that had seized him (modifies Anders).
2. He felt himself trembling, a vibration so faint as barely to be perceptible, but then stronger (modifies and makes more specific trembling). Now he uses two similes to further modify the trembling: 1) like a dangerous winter chill 2) like freezing outdoors, unsheltered
3. It drove him back to his bed, and under his sheets
4. He lay there for a long while, hiding, willing this day, just begun, please, please, not to begin (modifies Anders)
Please, please give it a try. One step at a time.
Let me know what happens.
I pulled out the 'unsheltered' to see the effect, a single word, and it weakened it. Unsheltered seems to tie together the series of es's (is that the right way to state it?) and to fill in a long gap between them - stood, seized, stronger, unsheltered, sheets - and it forms an antithesis with 'under his sheets' (matching the 'un') which is a form of shelter. It also slows the sentence just a bit, as if slowing his momentum, before he is driven back.
I like the soft or quiet of slow feel of 'and he felt himself trembling, a vibration so faint as barely to be perceptible' (versus 'so faint as to be barely perceptible' Is this anastrophe? I don't this so.) just before the sentence turns with 'but then stronger', but I'm not sure why. The sound? It picks up speed at this point with the similes (which I completely missed) then it stops on the hard 'drove him back'. The pacing of this sentence is like a roller coaster, or running across rolling fields.
So much more in this very interesting sentence. Thx.
Long sentences are tricky critters. Is a long sentence performing as you hope it will, or does it just sound as though you're losing control? I've followed the model sentence fairly closely in my attempt to compose one; I even pinched 'trembling'. Here goes:
Julia paused, the feathery fronds of baby’s breath trembling even as she tried to force her hand, her heart, not to, and she found herself searching, her eyes desperate to find him among all those who had gathered here to witness her moment of triumph, which was not a victory but a surrender, and he was nowhere, but there, at the end of the long, narrow aisle separating his from hers, was the other, waiting, expectant, and this must be done.