Going long

Peggy Noonan started it, for me, last month, when she wrote this 89-word sentence:

Both our political parties continue, even though they know they shouldn't, even though they're each composed of individuals many of whom actually know what time it is, even though they know we are in an extraordinary if extended moment, an ongoing calamity connected to our economic future, our nation's standing in the world, our strength and safety--even though they know all this, they continue to go through the daily motions, fund raising, vote counting, making ads with demon sheep, blasting out the latest gaffe of the other team.

Then, a few days later, I quoted a 100-word sentence from Don DeLillo in this space, and mimicked it with a 94-word sentence of my own. I've read all three of these sentences many times, and I love them more with each reading. So I was locked and loaded when my friend Bart called and said he needed an introduction to a swatch book for a paper called Finch Opaque. Bart and I have collaborated on a couple of years worth of promotional materials for Finch Paper LLC, and I know their story well. And so I sat down to write a sentence that, in and of itself, would be a differentiator; it would tell a complete story unlike anything else in the industry. And out of that came this:

When you want a real opaque, and no surprises, in delivery or on-press, and the feeling that everything's going to be okay, and the faith, the conviction, that what you will have at the end of your run will be everything you had in mind before you started, not to mention the comfort of picturing the mill beside the river in the town beside the forest, that one mill where all your paper will come from, made by the people who live in the town and do the work their people have done back through the generations, and the real person who takes your order knows all the people who will make your paper, and knows their children too, and all of them will stand behind not just their paper, but your paper, the paper they made for you, and they'll stand behind how it all works for you from the first call you make to the way you feel when you're holding the finished product in your hands -- when that's what you want, it's got to be Finch Opaque.

A whopping 181 words. The full measure of DeLillo's 100, and around the bend for 81 more. I read it over several times, to make sure I was serving Bart and the client well, and not just indulging my long-sentence obsession. I felt good about it, and so I sent it. When I hadn't heard anything by end of day, I called and asked how they liked it. Bart was unavailable, but his designer Gosia said he had received it, had sent it to the client, and it "would do for now." That doesn't sound so good. I've probably read it 20 times, and I'm still partial to it. I hope somebody reads it here and says, "Hey Bill, can you write one of those for us?" If there's a place for the long sentence on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, and in the American novel, why not in the way a business talks about itself?

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?