"And, seeing the train winding behind him, he thought with pride of it, of the onwardness of its people, of their stubborn, unthought-out yondering. It wasn't a thing for reason, this yondering, but for the heart, where secrets lay deep and mixed. Money? Land? New chances? Patriotism? All together they weren't enough. In the beginning, that is, they weren't enough, but as a man went on it came to him how wide and wealthy was his country, and the pride he had talked about at first became so real he lost the words for it."I cannot help but be astounded by the miracle of such an inconspicuous combination of ordinary words. Taken apart and set aside individually, none of them bring to mind much of any seeming import. But, write about the onwardness of a people, pull out of your hat an earthy word like yondering, and have a man realize how wide and wealthy was his country and your mind begins to formulate whole knots of thought. You likely have no idea from where this passage comes, but reading it--a gathering of a mere handful of words--you sense immediately the emotion of it. You can probably pinpoint the historical context, you almost certainly begin to see in your mind's eye vast, open plains and hear dust crunching under weary feet, sense fatigue mixed with the energy of pride and deep ambition. That is surely a lot to happen in one paragraph. It becomes then a remarkable arrangement of mere words into a sentence that you have never read before and that you can feel deep inside of yourself.
One of the things I most enjoy about reading is stumbling upon a combination of words that fit one another just right or are melded together in a way I have never seen or heard or considered before. It might be a longer passage like the one above that makes larger points or raises more than one question or it could be just a small phrase scattered among the rest that dances upon the ear and causes me to stop and smile a bit and admire the craft of writing.
I am thinking about these things in part because it was Noam Chomsky's birthday this week and I read a very good piece by Gary Marcus in The New Yorker, which you can find here, that discussed the noted linguist and his monumental impact on that field and others. But, I am also thinking of these things because I recently finished Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls--the book he considered his masterwork, but that I had never read before--and because I am still reading and savoring the book from which the above passage comes, A.B. Guthrie's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Way West.
We all know about the Hemingway style, of course, have all likely read the critical introductions to Hills Like White Elephants that tell us about The Lost Generation and his short, declarative sentences, honed during his work as a reporter, that left a permanent imprint upon the face of modern fiction. Perhaps it is because of Ernest Hemingway that I love sparse sentences. I have always preferred writers who can say all they need to say and more with the most efficient use of language possible. I see that as genuine craftsmanship. Language does not have to be dressed up. It need only be pieced together truthfully and honestly.
But, I owe my admiration for this kind of writing as much to the likes of Guthrie and Wallace Stegner and Wendell Berry and Ivan Doig and so many others, craftsmen all who write of ordinary things and people and places and who can make you see clearly a thing by talking about it in the same language we ourselves use to talk to one another everyday. They create lyrical prose born of the commonplace.
" . . . but what filled this back part of his mind was the day-after-day roll of wheels, the dust, the heat and wind and rain and mud and chill, and the Turleys turning back and Martin crying for grace. His life before seemed like another life. All he ever had done was poke a team or explore the trail or push cattle along. The only way he ever faced was west."
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