The week was dead: it passed away somewhere between Mass and Sunday lunch, which between them finished it off, knocked the living daylights out of it with the sacerdotal rod and the Sunday roast.
“I am Nothing, I am Everything,” by Rachel Cusk, from the essay collection, Coventry
I know I recently wrote about personification, but this sentence consumed me because it reconfigured my reality: Sunday will never be the same. Students often ask whether style techniques such as personification can be used in nonfiction. Cusk’s essay collection provides a definitive YES.
Cusk’s essay is about her visit on a Sunday to the Basilica di San Francesco, the mother of all Catholic churches in Italy. But really the essay is about the oppressiveness of religion as opposed to the freedom of art.
This sentiment leaks into Cusk’s sentence. The week, an inanimate thing (as far as we know), is animated by assigning it death. What killed it? Sunday. Specifically, Sunday Mass and Sunday lunch.
The sentence is also funny because of hyperbole, which is used to exaggerate the numbing effect of Sunday on her psyche. (She goes on to write, “There was no hope given out for Monday, or for Tuesday either”).
Cusk further heightens the humor and energy in the sentence by using different registers. A register is nothing more than a name for a kind of diction. We can say “Mother,” (high register) or “Mom” (low register). “Ladies and Gentlemen,” or “Hey there.” Cusk includes “sacerdotal,” and also “finished them off,” and the even more colloquial-sounding, “knocked the living daylights out of it.” By jostling together registers, you get more dissonance and hence more humor and richness, which is emblematic of the human voice.
The Making
Take an inanimate object and assign it human qualities or abilities. If it doesn’t come to you easily, play around. Take a piece of paper and write down the inanimate object in the center of the page. Now jot down human traits and abilities. Draw lines from the object to the traits/abilities. Make connections. Play.
Now write a simple sentence, with a subject and a verb predicate, as Cusk did—The week was dead.
Add a colon. Write another base clause, with a subject and verb (“it passed away…” and add specific details to flesh out your first sentence. Can you add balance—the pairing of two things? Cusks paired Mass and Sunday lunch.
Now add one more clause or phrase and use both a high register word(s) and a low register word or phrase as Cusk does with “sacerdotal” and “knocked the living daylights out of it.” Notice that she made even more specific Mass and the Sunday lunch. Can you add balance, as Cusk did with sacerdotal rod and Sunday roast?
There is room for repetition of sound, which is music, after all:
Assonance: away/Sunday/daylights; passed/Mass; finished/it/living; off/knocked; sacerdotal/roast
A little side note about sound: The long “o” sound is a low-frequency bass sound, according to John Frederick Nims, author of Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, which evokes what is powerful, awesome, ominous, or gloomy. It’s interesting to note that Cusk’s sentence ends with “roast,” a low-frequency vowel sound, and that word echoes with “sacerdotal,” which calls up the religious thread of the sentence.
Play around with this.
Let me know what else you see or how it goes.
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I so love this. In the South, Every Sunday after mass, fried chicken dinner, sadness and remorse over the dead week. Uphill til Monday…
Such a great way to parse this awesome sentence! Love it.