A DeLillo sentence

If you've ever read the quotes to the right of this space, you may have noticed that the first one is from Don DeLillo. It's all about the sentence, with him. For that reason alone, without fretting over some of the things his bewildered reviewers must consider, I buy each of his new books as soon as they come out. My favorite sentence from his new novelette goes like this:

A hundred years of junk, this is what I saw, glass, rags, metal, wood, alone here, we'd left her, and the feeling in the body, the sheer deadness in my arms and shoulders, and not knowing what to say to him, and the chance, the faint prospect that we'd be standing on the deck in faded light and she'd come walking along the sandpath and we'd barely believe what we were seeing, he and I, and it would take only moments to forget the past several hours and we'd go in to dinner and be the people we always were.

I see a lot of trust here, in us, his readers, to paddle out into the current and just go with it, from comma to comma, taking comfort in his lists of things, because he does like to do that, list the things he sees, in a kitchen, or a shed, nothing special about them, except that we read them and know we've been there ourselves, and then feel things we've felt, and know things we've known, and what about her, the one that was left alone there, yes, that night, what about her?