How to Write a Sentence (10 page)

In Lawrence’s and Hawthorne’s first sentences, events in the world of men and women are foreshadowed by nonhuman vehicles—tramcars, doors, colors. Although these sentences are not explicitly involved in the narration of action, they nevertheless set the stage on which action—of a human and unhappy kind—subsequently occurs. But there are first sentences where the nonhuman is not a vehicle of something else, but occupies both background and foreground. These first sentences are often meditations rather than narratives. Here is the first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature” (1844):

There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts.

The sentence is a series of “when” clauses that aren’t going anywhere. They march in place, and the place is glorious. The proportion of bleakness to sunlight is the reverse of what it is in Lawrence’s sentence. The “bleak upper sides of the planet” are mentioned only to be dispelled and sent away. Indeed, it is the business of the sentence to transform time-bound particulars and variations—of emotion, thought, climate, place—into a vision of eternal bliss like the Garden of Eden or the Hesperian Gardens of Ovidian myth (“the happiest latitudes”). The first three words, “There are days,” suggest that whatever these days are, they are exceptional, and unusual in “this climate.” But then we are told that such days can occur “at almost any season” and we begin to suspect that it may be an inner as well as an outer weather that is being described. The hallmark of this weather is twofold: harmony among all things and the absence of thought, that is, of the kind of questioning and questing that signifies being at a distance from that harmony. When everything that lives gives sign of satisfaction, that sign is not something added to the natural repose of being; it
is
that repose, which is why the image of it is the cattle that lie on the ground, not moving, and having great and tranquil thoughts. The thoughts are great because tranquil—that is, unruffled, serene, calm, quiet, unperturbed, not really thoughts at all. Cattle, after all, don’t think, which is exactly the point.

At the very opposite end of the first-sentence continuum are sentences that, rather than moving away from deliberative thought, insist on it aggressively. They are first sentences that are neither narratives nor meditations nor celebrations. They are arguments; they pose problems, issue challenges, advance theses, consider objections, draw conclusions. “Politics,” the essay that follows “Nature” in Emerson’s second series, is one of these:

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born, that they are not superior to the citizen, that every one of them was once the act of a single man, every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case, that they are all imitable, all alterable, we may make as good, we may make better.

This is a sentence that dismantles its putative subject. The sentence begins by placing us in a relationship of negotiation to the state; it is we, apparently, who must figure out how to deal with it. The state, then, is the ostensible center of the sentence, but in fact it is its largest casualty, for it is under attack as soon as it is named in the first clause. After that we learn only what it is not, and with every “that” clause, the claims the state has on us by virtue of its temporal duration are weakened. It is not aboriginal, that is, indigenous and natural; even though its institutions preceded us in time, they were themselves created by single men; and they were created not in accordance with some timeless, abstract norm, but in response to a “particular” and, because particular, temporary need. In short the institutions that ask for our deference were made by us and “we”—the word that takes over the sentence at its end—can remake them or make them “better.” What the sentence argues is that faith in the state is faith in a chimera. And, moreover, faith in law as if it were something standing above us, is a mistake, for as Emerson says a little later, “The law is but a memorandum” (another great sentence), the record of an agreement we may rescind tomorrow: “The statute stands there to say, yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article today?” This question is asked with an insistence difficult to ignore; that’s what the argumentative mode does.

Argumentative first sentences are not always so straightforward. Often the argument is implicit, as it is in the first sentence of George Eliot’s
Silas Marner
(1861):

In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak—there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men who, by the side of the brawny country folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.

The sentence begins as if it were going to be an elegiac description of a bygone day (“In the days”), but it is quickly complicated and made more serious by a parenthetical observation that introduces irony, social satire, and class conflict. The leisured ladies who play at spinning with wheels that are polished toys aestheticize a genuine activity; they are the antithesis of “the brawny country folk” who do real work; they do not make the silk and lace they wear. And in the rest of the sentence a third group is introduced or half introduced. They are neither brawny nor clothed in silk. In fact they are difficult to see, small (“undersized”) and so pale that they seem to emerge from some underground world “deep in the bosom of the hills.” The description of them as “the remnants of a disinherited race” links them to the cursed children of Cain and the outcast wandering Jew. Who are these men? Who or what has disinherited them? What was their original sin? Can they be saved? Suddenly at the end of a sentence that began as an idealized portrait of country life we find ourselves at the beginning of a morality play and of a dissertation on class, labor, and the nature of wealth.

The morality and the argument are even more explicit in the first sentence of Booth Tarkington’s
The Gentleman from Indiana
(1899):

There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travelers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without.

The first part of this sentence is built on the understated (we do not notice it at first) tension between “fertile” and “unagrarian.” “Fertile” is undoubtedly a positive word; it goes along with the flatness the travelers will find boring; “unagrarian” seems merely descriptive when we encounter it, as does the phrase “Eastern travelers.” Things begin to sharpen with “glancing”; the Eastern travelers don’t engage the fertility of the Indiana landscape; they see it out of the corners of their eyes, and they immediately recoil from it (“shudder”), from its uninteresting (to them) flatness, and turn their attention to something that is the opposite of fertility, “interior upholstery,” something manufactured by turning nature’s bounties into dead and meretricious—because prideful and ornamental—objects. When the sentence, in a final participial clause, makes the preference of the Eastern travelers explicit—they prefer a swaying canopy to the swaying of tall corn—we have learned to scorn their scorn. “Eastern” is now an epithet, and “unagrarian” is now an accusation that means “incapable of appreciating or even seeing the beauties of a midwestern landscape.” The final phrase, “the monotony without,” is understood to be the judgment of those who look but do not see, those whose souls harbor a monotony far flatter, in a deep sense, than the fields they turn away from. The entire sentence is a judgment on them, and it pressures us to value everything they scorn.

The pressure and judgment are even greater in the first sentence of Increase Mather’s
A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New-England
(1676), because its argument is presupposed and the risk of dissenting from it is made clear:

That the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightful Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun, no man that is an inhabitant of any considerable standing, can be ignorant.

The argument proceeds by declaring there is no need to mount one and daring its reader to disagree on pain of being cast out. The possible objections to Mather’s confident assumption of God’s favor—that the land belongs to the Indians, that the English settlers are the aggressors—are disposed of briskly in a long dependent clause that, because of its “That” (such is the case) construction, forestalls disagreement. The acknowledgment that it is the settlers who live among the Indians is blunted before it is made when Mather describes the native inhabitants as “heathen people,” unbelievers who because they are uncivilized and unenlightened have no rights. The phrase “whose land” gives the heathens possession for an instant, but then the syntax makes the land the object of God’s having given it to someone else (The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away), to the English Israel, to the remnant of the faithful. God’s chosen move ever westward (“in these goings down of the Sun”) in an effort to escape the persecution of the ungodly, but the ungodly are now encountered again in the form of the native Indians, who, like Pharaoh, vainly resist Heaven’s will and hatch plots that can only come to naught. All this (and more) is assumed as an undoubted fact by the sentence’s syntax. And when the independent clause finally appears, it consigns anyone who would disagree with what precedes it to the category of the ignorant, the same category to which the heathens, ignorant of the true God, themselves belong.

The form of Mather’s sentence imitates the judgment of God. It is implacable. Nothing is going to stand in its way. The reader doesn’t have a chance or a choice. At first glance, the opening sentence of Jeremy Taylor’s
The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living
(1650) places the reader in a more independent position, but that doesn’t last:

He that is choice of his time will also be choice of his company, and choice of his actions, lest the first engage him in vanity and loss, and the latter by being criminal, be a throwing his time and himself away, and a going back in the accounts of eternity.

The form of the sentence is sententious; it is crisp and confident and promises to tie things down in neatly patterned parallels linked by the word “choice.” But “choice” has two meanings: that which is best or prime (a choice piece of land) and the act of choosing one thing or action over another. The first meaning suggests that the scale of value is already known and obvious; the second puts pressure on the “he” who must do the choosing. Will he—will the reader—choose well? The clause sets up a triple requirement: use your time well, do what you do in the company of right-thinking companions, and perform right actions. The dependent clause (beginning with “lest”) lists the dangers that await the man who fails the requirements, who wastes his time in the company of ne’er-do-wells. The dangers are parallel. Those who hook up with bad companions will be led into actions of vanity; their actions will be criminal because both time and the self will be wasted; the occasion for self-improvement will have been missed. All very neat, everything accounted for in a ledger and economy of virtue. But then the last clause, “a going back in the accounts of eternity,” widens the sentence’s perspective to the point where its apparent concerns are left behind. While “accounts” suggest the kind of balancing the sentence has so far been performing, the invocation of the vistas of eternity overwhelm, supersede, and cancel all accounts. In eternity’s accounts all man’s choices are less than froth. Why bother? What does it matter?

To assume the perspective of eternity is to ask these questions. If in the end everything we say or do will fade into insignificance in the vast panorama of eternity, why do anything? Why write sentences? The issue is squarely joined in the first sentence of Taylor’s
The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying
(1651):

A man is a bubble (saith the Greek proverb); which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, that all the world is a storm, and men arise up in their several generations, like bubbles descending
à Jove pluvio
, from God and the dew of heaven, from a tear and a drop of rain, from Nature and Providence: and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die, others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with the great drop of a cloud sink into flatness and froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before.

Instead of “dust unto dust,” this sentence enacts (over and over again) “water unto water.” There are bubbles, storms, dew, tears, rain, deluges, sheets, drops, clouds, froth—distinct names for an element that is always the same. These words are embedded in what offers itself as a narrative of the generations of man, and they have the effect of denying the distinctions the narrative is supposedly establishing, between men who die shortly after they are born, men who live for “two or three turns,” and men who live long. Even these longest-lasting men live only on the face of the waters and can scarcely be said to have an identity because they are “in perpetual motion” before they sink into froth, distinguishable from those who “instantly sink into the deluge of their first parents” only by the length of the time it takes them to dissolve. Indeed, all men, however short or long lived, sink into the deluge of their parents, that is, into the original sin whose fatally and massively debilitating effects bring all men to the same abysmal level no matter what the duration of their lives or their apparent accomplishments. The sentence ostentatiously offers different forms of water, and different forms of men, and suggests (momentarily) that they are distinguishable, but in the end (and in the beginning) they are all the same, and in its final clause, the sentence openly declares what it has all the while been doing, when it tells us that the change from mortal form to water and to annihilation is no change at all, “it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before.” Here is a long first sentence that tells us that there was never any place for it to go, that its forward motion is only apparent, that each moment in it is as important, or unimportant, as any other. A while back I suggested that Gertrude Stein’s desire for a language that by defeating linear composition gives readers the experience of a continuous present is implicitly theological. Here is the thing itself in a first sentence that is also the last sentence and everything in between.