Pico Iyer’s piece in the Los Angeles Times is a testament to the value of long sentences in our age of tweets and abbrevs. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Value of Long Sentences”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
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Do you ever get the feeling that your days are increasingly filled up with very, very short sentences?
When’s the last time you had the pleasure of watching a long sentence simply unspool?
I’m talking about the kind of sentence that invites you to come in and wander around and just luxuriate in it.
The writer Pico Iyer did that recently in an essay in the Los Angeles Times.
He was celebrating the joy of the long sentence.
And it’s the kind of sentence he writes that, quote, has so much room for near contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified or put into easy words.
That it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time.
And to descend as if by a spiral staircase deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either or.
And then he goes on, when I read the great exemplar of this, Herman Melville, and when I feel the building tension as Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham jail swells with clause after biblical clause of all the things people of his skin color cannot do,
I feel as if I’m stepping out of the crowded, over-lighted, fluorescent culture of my local convenience store
And being taken up to a very high place from which I can see across time and space in myself and in the world.
Grant, I just love that. I mean, that kind of sentence really does take you to a different place, doesn’t it?
And I mean, for me, it’s like finally going on vacation.
You know, you stop, you turn off, and you really focus on something else.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And there’s the immersion.
That’s the important part of it.
You need to not only be immersed in it while you’re reading it, but you need that time afterward to mull it over, to consider it.
Yes, and the essay itself by Pico Iyer in the Los Angeles Times is that kind of essay with those kinds of luxurious sentences, you know, winding down like a spiral staircase.
So we will put a link to that essay on our website, which is at waywordradio.org.
And in the meantime, if you want to talk with us about language, the number is 877-929-9673.
