Here are 65 examples of long sentences ranging from the relatively brief 96 words

to one of the longest sentences at 2,156 words.

Almost all of the really long sentences are under 1,000 words. The six longest
sentences (1,000+ words) are mostly a curiosity, just to see what is possible.

I hope students of writing can study these sentences to find inspiration. My advice
on how to learn from them? Try these three practices:

1. Copy them exactly

2. Take them apart, analyze each part, and see how the engine works
3. Ape their form with different content

I also hope this list might be helpful for teachers and professors of writing, who
want more lengthy sentence examples to show their students. If you want to teach
short sentences, I’ve also compiled a list of those.

The longest sentence in English is also awesome. The longest sentence award goes
to:

Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, 13,955 word sentence

And for a runner-up: James Joyce, Ulysses, 4,391 word sentence
And there are even one-sentence books — actually, a few of them. But I’m not
reposting an entire book.

And let’s end all this nonsense about how long sentences = run-on sentences. You
can have a six-word run-on sentence (“I went shopping I ate donuts.”), while most
of the sentences below are much, much longer than that and are not run-ons (except
for a few examples like Jose Saramago). But whether the sentence is grammatically
correct isn’t nearly as important as whether the sentence is fun or beautiful.

I hope that a study of very long sentences will arm you with strategies that are
almost as diverse as the sentences themselves, such as: starting each clause with
the same word, tilting with dependent clauses toward a revelation at the end,
padding with parentheticals, showing great latitude toward standard punctuation,
rabbit-trailing away from the initial subject, encapsulating an entire life, and
lastly, as this sentence is, celebrating the list.

What’s the definition of a long sentence? For my purposes, I’m defining it as more
than a 100 words. I’ve cheated with a few beautiful sentences a few words short,
because there is no sense in having an absolute and arbitrary rule, but more than
100 words was my guiding principle. I think any sentence more than 100 words is
almost guaranteed to be complex, complicated, and enormous.

If you like this list, please check out this other writing resource at Bookfox:

17 Fantastic Examples of Sentence Repetitions

As far as improving the list, I’d love to make it more diverse. If you have
suggestions of 100+ word sentences from the type of authors who aren’t represented
here, I would love if you could post your example in the comments, or at least
direct me to where I could find it.

Also, if you have a sentence that you love from a particular author, and you think
it’s a better sentence than the one I’ve quoted, please, by all means, let’s have
the sentences do battle! Post it and we’ll see whether it’s better.

And also, if you’re studying sentences, you probably would like advice on how to
write a book.
In which case you should definitely read my post on the best advice on how to write
your novel.

As an editor, I’ve helped hundreds of writers start and finish their stories, so
please learn from all that experience.

LONG SENTENCE EXAMPLES IN LITERATURE

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “THE GIFT.” 96 WORDS.
“As he crossed toward the pharmacy at the corner he involuntarily turned his head
because of a burst of light that had ricocheted from his temple, and saw, with that
quick smile with which we greet a rainbow or a rose, a blindingly white
parallelogram of sky being unloaded from the van—a dresser with mirrors across
which, as across a cinema screen, passed a flawlessly clear reflection of boughs
sliding and swaying not arboreally, but with a human vacillation, produced by the
nature of those who were carrying this sky, these boughs, this gliding façade.”

JOSE SARAMAGO, “BLINDNESS.” 97 WORDS.

“On offering to help the blind man, the man who then stole his car, had not, at
that precise moment, had any evil intention, quite the contrary, what he did was
nothing more than obey those feelings of generosity and altruism which, as everyone
knows, are the two best traits of human nature and to be found in much more
hardened criminals than this one, a simple car-thief without any hope of advancing
in his profession, exploited by the real owners of this enterprise, for it is they
who take advantage of the needs of the poor.”

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “LOLITA.” 99 WORDS.

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was
three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her
subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand
my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely,
you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some
hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a
hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.”

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LAURENCE STERNE, “THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY.” 107 WORDS.
“The French are certainly misunderstood: — but whether the fault is theirs, in not
sufficiently explaining themselves, or speaking with that exact limitation and
precision which one would expect on a point of such importance, and which,
moreover, is so likely to be contested by us — or whether the fault may not be
altogether on our side, in not understanding their language always so critically as
to know “what they would be at” — I shall not decide; but ‘tis evident to me, when
they affirm, “That they who have seen Paris, have seen every thing,” they must mean
to speak of those who have seen it by day-light.”

E.B. WHITE, “STUART LITTLE.” 107 WORDS.

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms
trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and
pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the
streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge,
where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields
ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top
toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get
a drink of sarsaparilla.”

W.G. SEBALD, “THE RINGS OF SATURN.” 107 WORDS.

“All I know is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room, with its
north-facing windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael said he
no longer worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer; and that, while
we talked of the difficulty of heating old houses, a strange feeling came upon me,
as if it were not he who had abandoned that place of work but I, as if the
spectacles cases, letters and writing materials that had evidently lain untouched
for months in the soft north light had once been my spectacle cases, my letters and
my writing materials.”

SAUL BELLOW, “THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH.” 110 WORDS.

“But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee’s footing with the
girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of
hardware, glassware, chocolate, chicken-feed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth, and song
hits—that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor,
hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the
fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the
trolleys on Chicago Avenue—the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and
blackened forms of five-storey buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from
the Christmas blaze of shops.”

MARGARET ATWOOD, “THE HANDMAID’S TALE.” 111 WORDS.

“She’s too young, it’s too late, we come apart, my arms are held, and the edges go
dark and nothing is left but a little window, a very little window, like the wrong
end of a telescope, like the window on a Christmas card, an old one, night and ice
outside, and within a candle, a shining tree, a family, I can hear the bells even,
sleigh bells, from the radio, old music, but through this window I can see, small
but very clear, I can see her, going away from me, through the trees which are
already turning, red and yellow, holding out her arms to me, being carried away.”

VIRGINIA WOOLF, “MRS. DALLOWAY.” 116 WORDS.

“It was not to them (not to Hugh, or Richard, or even to devoted Miss Brush) the
liberator of the pent egotism, which is a strong martial woman, well nourished,
well descended, of direct impulses, downright feelings, and little introspective
power (broad and simple–why could not every one be broad and simple? she asked)
feels rise within her, once youth is past, and must eject upon some object–it may
be Emigration, it may be Emancipation; but whatever it be, this object round which
the essence of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous,
half looking glass, half precious stone; now carefully hidden in case people should
sneer at it; now proudly displayed.”

WILLIAM FAULKNER, “THAT EVENING SUN.” 118 WORDS.

The streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting
down more and more of the shade trees–the water oaks, the maples and locusts and
elms–to make room for iron poles bearing clusters of bloated and ghostly and
bloodless grapes, and we have a city laundry which makes the rounds on Monday
morning, gathering the bundles of clothes into bright-colored, specially-made motor
cars: the soiled wearing of a whole week now flees apparitionlike behind alert and
irritable electric horns, with a long diminishing noise of rubber and asphalt like
tearing silk, and even the Negro women who still take in white people’s washing
after the old custom, fetch and deliver it in automobiles.

JANE AUSTEN, “NORTHANGER ABBEY.” 119 WORDS.

“Her plan for the morning thus settled, she sat quietly down to her book after
breakfast, resolving to remain in the same place and the same employment till the
clock struck one; and from habitude very little incommoded by the remarks and
ejaculations of Mrs. Allen, whose vacancy of mind and incapacity for thinking were
such, that as she never talked a great deal, so she could never be entirely silent;
and, therefore, while she sat at her work, if she lost her needle or broke her
thread, if she heard a carriage in the street, or saw a speck upon her gown, she
must observe it aloud, whether there were anyone at leisure to answer her or not.”

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ, “AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH.” 121 WORDS.

“She had said I’m tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this
business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the
time, sir, and she had said it with the same naturalness with which on one national
holiday she had made her way through the guard of honor with a basket of empty
bottles and reached the presidential limousine that was leading the parade of
celebration in an uproar of ovations and martial music and storms of flowers and
she shoved the basket through the window and shouted to her son that since you’ll
be passing right by take advantage and return these bottles to the store on the
corner, poor mother.”

DENIS JOHNSON, “DIRTY WEDDING.” 121 WORDS.

“I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they
brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it
when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north
in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen
spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor,
watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard
of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in
turn erased by a—wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head—tunnel)
actually lived.”

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WILLIAM FAULKNER, “ABSOLOM, ABSOLOM.” 122 WORDS.
“From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary
dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office
because her father had called it that–a dim hot airless room with the blinds all
closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had
believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler,
and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became
latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Qunetin thought of as being
flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as
wind might have blown them.”

LEO TOLSTOY, “ANNA KARENINA.” 123 WORDS.

“It is true that Alexei Alexandrovich vaguely sensed the levity and erroneousness
of this notion of his faith, and he knew that when, without any thought that his
forgiveness was the effect of a higher power, he had given himself to his
spontaneous feeling, he had experienced greater happiness than when he thought
every minute, as he did now, that Christ lived in his soul, and that by signing
papers he was fulfilling His will, but it was necessary for him to think that way,
it was so necessary for him in his humiliation to possess at least an invented
loftiness from which he, despised by everyone, could despise others, that he clung
to his imaginary salvation as if it were salvation indeed.”

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, “THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.” 125 WORDS.

“And this Fyodor Pavlovich began to exploit; that is, he fobbed him off with small
sums, with short-term handouts, until, after four years, Mitya, having run out of
patience, came to our town a second time to finish his affairs with his parent,
when it suddenly turned out, to
nothing, that it was impossible
received the whole value of his
even be in debt to him, that in
freely entered into on such and
more, and so on and so forth.”
his great amazement, that he already had precisely
even to get an accounting, that he had already
property in cash from Fyodor Pavlovich and might
terms of such and such deals that he himself had
such dates, he had no right to demand anything

ORHAN PAMUK, “MY NAME IS RED.” 127 WORDS.

“We were two men in love with the same woman; he was in front of me and completely
unaware of my presence as we walked through the turning and twisting streets of
Istanbul, climbing and descending, we traveled like brethren through deserted
streets given over to battling packs of stray dogs, passed burnt ruins where jinns
loitered, mosque courtyards where angels reclined on domes to sleep, beside cypress
trees murmuring to the souls of the dead, beyond the edges of snow-covered
cemeteries crowded with ghosts, just out of sight of brigands strangling their
victims, passed endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leather works
and stone walls; and as we made ground, I felt I wasn’t following him at all, but
rather, that I was imitating him.”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, “THE JAZZ AGE.” 127 WORDS.

“Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper
in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood
alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first
abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses,
and people you didn’t want to know said ‘Yes, we have no bananas’, and it seemed
only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the
world be run by those who saw things as they were and it all seems rosy and
romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely
about our surroundings any more.”

TOM WOLFE, “A SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE.” 128 WORDS.

“All round them, ten, scores, it seems like hundreds, of faces and bodies are
perspiring, trooping and bellying up the stairs with arterio-sclerotic grimaces
past a showcase full of such novel items as Joy Buzzers, Squirting Nickels, Finger
Rats, Scary Tarantulas and spoons with realistic dead flies on them, past Fred’s
barbershop, which is just off the landing and has glossy photographs of young men
with the kind of baroque haircuts one can get in there, and up onto 50th Street
into a madhouse of traffic and shops with weird lingerie and gray hair-dyeing
displays in the windows, signs for free teacup readings and a pool-playing match
between the Playboy Bunnies and Downey’s Showgirls, and then everybody pounds on
toward the Time-Life Building, the Brill Building or NBC.”

E.L. DOCTOROW, “HOMER AND LANGELY.” 135 WORDS.

“The houses over to Central Park West went first, they got darker as if dissolving
into the dark sky until I couldn’t make them out, and then the trees began to lose
their shape, and finally, this was toward the end of the season, maybe it was late
February of that very cold winter, and all I could see were these phantom shapes of
the white ice, that last light, went gray and then altogether black, and then all
my sight was gone though I could hear clearly the scoot scut of the blades on ice,
a very satisfying sound, a soft sound though full of intention, a deeper tone that
you’d expect made by the skate blades, perhaps for having sounded the resonant
basso of the water under the ice, scoot scut, scoot scut.”

VICTOR HUGO, “LES MISERABLES.” 136 WORDS.

“While the men made bullets and the women lint, while a large saucepan of melted
brass and lead, destined to the bullet-mould smoked over a glowing brazier, while
the sentinels watched, weapon in hand, on the barricade, while Enjolras, whom it
was impossible to divert, kept an eye on the sentinels, Combeferre, Courfeyrac,
Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and some others, sought each other
out and united as in the most peaceful of days of their conversations in their
student life, and, in one corner of this wine-shop which had been converted into a
casement, a couple of paces distant from the redoubt which they had built, with
their carbines loaded and primed resting against the backs of their chairs, these
fine young fellows, so close to a supreme hour, began to recite love verses.”

ANNIE PROULX, “CLOSE RANGE.” 142 WORDS.

“But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and
slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved
with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black
ice, hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat
boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry
rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road,
band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the
roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards
and Mexican cafes behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE
BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.”

PHILIP ROTH, “THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA.” 142 WORDS.

“Elizabeth, New Jersey, when my mother was being raised there in a flat over her
father’s grocery store, was an industrial port a quarter the size of Newark,
dominated by the Irish working class and their politicians and the tightly knit
parish life that revolved around the town’s many churches, and though I never heard
her complain of having been pointedly ill-treated in Elizabeth as a girl, it was
not until she married and moved to Newark’s new Jewish neighborhood that she
discovered the confidence that led her to become first a PTA “grade mother,” then a
PTA vice president in charge of establishing a Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, and
finally the PTA president, who, after attending a conference in Trenton on
infantile paralysis, proposed an annual March of Dimes dance on January 30 –
President Roosevelt’s birthday – that was accepted by most schools.”

JONATHAN FRANZEN, “THE CORRECTIONS.” 148 WORDS.

“He had time for one subversive thought about his parents’ Nordic Pleasurelines
shoulder bags – either Nordic Pleasurelines sent bags like these to every booker of
its cruises as a cynical means of getting inexpensive walk-about publicity or as a
practical means of tagging the cruise participants for greater ease of handling at
embarkation points or as a benign means of building espirit de corps; or else Enid
and Alfred had deliberately saved the bags from some previous Nordic Pleasurelines
cruise, and, out a misguided sense of loyalty, had chosen to carry them on their
upcoming cruise as well; and in either case Chip was appalled by his parents’
willingness to make themselves vectors of corporate advertising – before he
shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing LaGuardia Airport and
New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of
his parents.”

EVELYN WAUGH, “SCOOP.” 150 WORDS.

“The Francmason weighed anchor, swung about, and steamed into the ochre hills,
through the straits and out into the open sea while Corker recounted the heroic
legends of Fleet Street; he told of the classic scoops and hoaxes; of the
confessions wrung from hysterical suspects; of the innuendo and intricate
misrepresentations, the luscious, detailed inventions that composed contemporary
history; of the positive, daring lies that got a chap a rise of screw; how Wenlock
Jakes, highest paid journalist of the United States, scooped the world with an eye-
witness story of the sinking of the Lusitania four hours before she was hit; how
[Sir Jocelyn] Hitchcock, the English Jakes, straddling over his desk in London, had
chronicled day by day the horrors of the Messina earthquake; how Corker himself,
not three months back, had had the good fortune to encounter a knight’s widow
trapped by the foot between lift and landing.”

JOHN UPDIKE, “RABBIT, RUN.” 163 WORDS.

“But then they were married (she felt awful about being pregnant before but Harry
had been talking about marriage for a while and anyway laughed when she told him in
early February about missing her period and said Great she was terribly frightened
and he said Great and lifted her put his arms around under her bottom and lifted
her like you would a child he could be so wonderful when you didn’t expect it in a
way it seemed important that you didn’t expect it there was so much nice in him she
couldn’t explain to anybody she had been so frightened about being pregnant and he
made her be proud) they were married after her missing her second period in March
and she was still little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her husband was
a conceited lunk who wasn’t good for anything in the world Daddy said and the
feeling of being alone would melt a little with a little drink.”

HENRY JAMES, “THE GOLDEN BOWL.” 165 WORDS.

“She had got up with these last words; she stood there before him with that
particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit of their life
together had not closed his sense, kept sharp, year after year, by the collation of
types and signs, the comparison of fine object with fine object, of one degree of
finish, of one form of the exquisite with another–the appearance of some slight,
slim draped “antique” of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a
note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern
impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after
centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of
the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the
impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in worn
relief round and round a precious vase.”

SALMAN RUSHDIE, “THE SATANIC VERSES.” 165 WORDS.

“But at the time he had no doubt; what had taken him over was the will to live,
unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first thing it did was to inform him
that it wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed
affair of mimicry and voices, it intended to bypass all that, and he found himself
surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his
own body, because it began in the very centre of his body and spread outwards,
turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel, except that it also felt
like a fist that enveloped him from outside, holding him in a way that was both
unbearably tight and intolerably gentle; until finally it had conquered him totally
and could work his mouth, his fingers, whatever it chose, and once it was sure of
its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the
balls.”

JANE AUSTEN, “EMMA.” 180 WORDS.

“The charming Augusta Hawkins, in addition to all the usual advantages of perfect
beauty and merit, was in possession of an independent fortune, of so many thousands
as would always be called ten; a point of some dignity, as well as some
convenience: the story told well; he had not thrown himself away — he had gained a
woman of ten thousand pounds, or thereabouts; and he had gained her with such
delightful rapidity — the first hour of introduction had been so very soon followed
by distinguishing notice; the history which he had to give Mrs. Cole of the rise
and progress of the affair was so glorious — the steps so quick, from the
accidental rencontre, to the dinner at Mr. Green’s, and the party at Mrs. Brown’s —
smiles and blushes rising in importance — with consciousness and agitation richly
scattered — the lady had been so easily impressed — so sweetly disposed — had in
short, to use a most intelligible phrase, been so very ready to have him, that
vanity and prudence were equally contented.”

THOMAS BERNHARD. “CORRECTION.” 181 WORDS.

“After a mild pulmonary infection, tended too little and too late, had suddenly
turned into a severe pneumonia that took its toll of my entire body and laid me up
for at least three months at nearby Wels, which has a hospital renowned in the
field of so-called internal medicine, I accepted an invitation from Hoeller, a so-
called taxidermist in the Aurach valley, not for the end of October, as the doctors
urged, but for early in October, as I insisted, and then went on my own so-called
responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller’s house, without even a
detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret,
to begin sifting and perhaps even arranging the literary remains of my friend, who
was also a friend of the taxidermist Hoeller, Roithamer, after Roithamer’s suicide,
I went to work sifting and sorting the papers he had willed to me, consisting of
thousands of slips covered with Roithamer’s handwriting plus a bulky manuscript
entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special
attention to the Cone.”

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MARCEL PROUST, “REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST.” 192 WORDS.

“No doubt this astonishment is to some extent due to the fact that the other person
on such occasions presents some new facet; but so great is the multiformity of each
individual, so abundant the wealth of lines of face and body, so few of which leave
any trace, once we are no longer in the presence of the other person, we depend on
the arbitrary simplicity of our recollection, since the memory has selected some
distinctive feature that had struck us, has isolated it, exaggerated it, making of
a woman who has appeared to us tall a sketch in which her figure is elongated out
of all proportion, or of a woman who has seemed to be pink-cheeked and golden-
haired a pure “Harmony in Pink and Gold”, and the moment this woman is once again
standing before us, all the other forgotten qualities which balance that one
remembered feature at once assail us, in their confused complexity, diminishing her
height, paling her cheeks, and substituting for what we came exclusively to seek,
other features which we remember having noticed the first time and fail to
understand why we so little expected to find them again.”

A.A. MILNE, “WINNIE-THE-POOH.” 194 WORDS.

“In after-years he liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during the
Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last half-hour
of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a branch of his tree
to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an aunt who had once laid a
seagull’s egg by mistake, and the story went on and on, rather like this sentence,
until Piglet who was listening out of his window without much hope, went to sleep
quietly and naturally, slipping slowly out of the window towards the water until he
was only hanging on by his toes, at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from
Owl, which was really part of the story, being what his aunt said, woke the Piglet
up and just gave him time to jerk himself back into safety and say, “How
interesting, and did she?” when—well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw
the good ship, The Brain of Pooh (Captain, C. Robin; 1st Mate, P. Bear) coming over
the sea to rescue him.”

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, “DON QUIXOTE.” 200 WORDS.

“About this time, when some rain began to fall, Sancho proposed that they should
shelter themselves in the fulling-mill, but Don Quixote had conceived such
abhorrence for it, on account of what was past, that he would no means set foot
within its wall; wherefore, turning to the right-hand, they chanced to fall in with
a road different from that in which they had traveled the day before; they had not
gone far, when the knight discovered a man riding with something on his head, that
glittered like polished gold, and scarce had he descried this phenomenon, when
turning to Sancho, “I find,” said he, “that every proverb is strictly true; indeed,
all of them are apophthegms dictated by experience herself; more especially, that
which says, “shut one door, and another will soon open”: this I mention, because,
if last night, fortune shut against us the door we fought to enter, by deceiving us
with the fulling-hammers; today another stands wide open, in proffering to use us,
another greater and more certain adventure, by which, if I fail to enter, it shall
be my own fault, and not imputed to my ignorance of fulling-mills, or the darkness
of the night.”

CORMAC MCCARTHY, “ALL THE PRETTY HORSES.” 205 WORDS.

“That night he dreamt of horses on a high plain where the spring rains had brought
up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and
yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running
and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young
mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their chestnut colors
shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the
flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he
and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their
running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew
off them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they
moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were
none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is
the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.”

CHARLES DICKENS, “BARNABY RUDGE.” 216 WORDS.

“There he sat, watching his wife as she decorated the room with flowers for the
greater honour of Dolly and Joseph Willet, who had gone out walking, and for whom
the tea-kettle had been singing gaily on the hob full twenty minutes, chirping as
never kettle chirped before; for whom the best service of real undoubted china,
patterned with divers round-faced mandarins holding up broad umbrellas, was now
displayed in all its glory; to tempt whose appetites a clear, transparent, juicy
ham, garnished with cool green lettuce-leaves and fragrant cucumber, reposed upon a
shady table, covered with a snow-white cloth; for whose delight, preserves and
jams, crisp cakes and other pastry, short to eat, with cunning twists, and cottage
loaves, and rolls of bread both white and brown, were all set forth in rich
profusion; in whose youth Mrs V. herself had grown quite young, and stood there in
a gown of red and white: symmetrical in figure, buxom in bodice, ruddy in cheek and
lip, faultless in ankle, laughing in face and mood, in all respects delicious to
behold—there sat the locksmith among all and every these delights, the sun that
shone upon them all: the centre of the system: the source of light, heat, life, and
frank enjoyment in the bright household world.”

HENRY JAMES, “ITALIAN HOURS.” 221 WORDS.

“To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a
modern city; with crowds and shops and theatres and cafes and balls and receptions
and dinner-parties, and all the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains; to
have at your door the good and evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour
to gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and to look
at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the still blue air, and the
pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the stillness, and the shaggy-
legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps
of ruin, and the scrambling goats and staggering little kids treading out wild
desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come back through
one of the great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the “world,”
dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about Middlemarch to a young
English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very low-cut
shirt–all this is to lead in a manner a double life and to gather from the hurrying
hours more impressions than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose
of.”

CORMAC MCCARTHY, “BLOOD MERIDIAN” 245 WORDS

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or
biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk
finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of
slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one
with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some
in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or
buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one
in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented
with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones
were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until
they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of
brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and
all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of
mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down
upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of
christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those
vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip
jerks and drools.”

CHARLES DICKENS, “BARNABY RUDGE.” 251 WORDS.

“To none of these interrogatories, whereof every one was more pathetically
delivered than the last, did Mrs Varden answer one word: but Miggs, not at all
abashed by this circumstance, turned to the small boy in attendance—her eldest
nephew—son of her own married sister—born in Golden Lion Court, number twenty-
sivin, and bred in the very shadow of the second bell-handle on the right- hand
door-post—and with a plentiful use of her pocket- handkerchief, addressed herself
to him: requesting that on his return home he would console his parents for the
loss of her, his aunt, by delivering to them a faithful statement of his having
left her in the bosom of that family, with which, as his aforesaid parents well
knew, her best affections were incorporated; that he would remind them that nothing
less than her imperious sense of duty, and devoted attachment to her old master and
missis, likewise Miss Dolly and young Mr Joe, should ever have induced her to
decline that pressing invitation which they, his parents, had, as he could testify,
given her, to lodge and board with them, free of all cost and charge, for evermore;
lastly, that he would help her with her box upstairs, and then repair straight
home, bearing her blessing and her strong injunctions to mingle in his prayers a
supplication that he might in course of time grow up a locksmith, or a Mr Joe, and
have Mrs Vardens and Miss Dollys for his relations and friends.”

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DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, “BOTH FLESH AND NOT.” 258 WORDS.
“There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive
butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each
other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner…until suddenly
Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to
his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short,
a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi
dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center,
Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right
back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does —
Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s
heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn
his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the
backhand side…and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and
sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out
of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a
topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s
past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce
corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands.”

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, “THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES.” 280 WORDS.

“The purity of his judicial character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his
public service in subsequent capacities; his devotedness to his party, and the
rigid consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all events,
kept pace with its organized movements; his remarkable zeal as president of a Bible
society; his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer of a widow’s and orphan’s fund;
his benefits to horticulture, by producing two much-esteemed varieties of the pear,
and to agriculture, through the agency of the famous Pyncheon-bull; the cleanliness
of his moral deportment, for a great many years past; the severity with which he
had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated son, delaying
forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of the young man’s life; his
prayers at morning and eventide, and graces at meal-time; his efforts in
furtherance of the temperance cause; his confining himself, since the last attack
of the gout, to five diurnal glasses of old sherry wine; the snowy whiteness of his
linen, the polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his gold-headed cane, the
square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material, and, in
general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment; the scrupulousness with
which he paid public notice, in the street, by a bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod,
or a motion of the hand, to all and sundry his acquaintances, rich or poor; the
smile of broad benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole
world;–what room could possibly be found for darker traits, in a portrait made up
of lineaments like these?”

NICOLAI GOGOL, “THE OVERCOAT” 282 WORDS.

“Even at the hour when the grey St. Petersburg sky had quite dispersed, and all the
official world had eaten or dined, each as he could, in accordance with the salary
he received and his own fancy; when all were resting from the departmental jar of
pens, running to and fro from their own and other people’s indispensable
occupations, and from all the work that an uneasy man makes willingly for himself,
rather than what is necessary; when officials hasten to dedicate to pleasure the
time which is left to them, one bolder than the rest going to the theatre; another,
into the street looking under all the bonnets; another wasting his evening in
compliments to some pretty girl, the star of a small official circle; another — and
this is the common case of all — visiting his comrades on the fourth or third
floor, in two small rooms with an ante-room or kitchen, and some pretensions to
fashion, such as a lamp or some other trifle which has cost many a sacrifice of
dinner or pleasure trip; in a word, at the hour when all officials disperse among
the contracted quarters of their friends, to play whist, as they sip their tea from
glasses with a kopek’s worth of sugar, smoke long pipes, relate at times some bits
of gossip which a Russian man can never, under any circumstances, refrain from,
and, when there is nothing else to talk of, repeat eternal anecdotes about the
commandant to whom they had sent word that the tails of the horses on the Falconet
Monument had been cut off, when all strive to divert themselves, Akakiy Akakievitch
indulged in no kind of diversion.”
JULES VERNE, “THE FLOATING ISLAND.” 286 WORDS.
“I have the honour to acquaint his Excellency the Governor of Floating Island, at
this moment in a hundred and seven-seven degrees thirteen minutes east of the
meridian of Greenwich, and in sixteen degrees fifty-four minutes south latitude,
that during the night of the 31st of December and the 1st of January, the steamer
Glen, of Glasgow, of three thousand five hundred tons, laden with wheat indigo,
rice, and wine, a cargo of considerable value, was run into by Floating Island,
belonging to the Floating Island Company, Limited, whose offices are at Madeleine
Bay, Lower California, United States of America, although the steamer was showing
the regulation lights, a white at the foremast, green at the starboard side, and
red at the port side, and that having got clear after the collision she was met
with the next morning thirty-five miles from the scene of the disaster, ready to
sink on account of a gap in her port side, and that she did sink after fortunately
putting her captain, his officers and crew on board the Herald, Her Britannic
Majesty’s cruiser of the first-class under the flag of Rear-Admiral Sir Edward
Collison, who reports the fact to his Exellency Governor Cyrus Bikerstaff,
requesting him to acknowledge the responsibility of the Floating Island Company,
Limited, under the guarantee of the inhabitants of the said Floating Island, in
favour of the owners of the said Glen, the value of which in hull, engines, and
cargo amounts to the sum of twelve hundred thousand pounds sterling, that is six
millions of dollars, which sum should be paid into the hands of the said Admiral
Sir Edward Collinson, or in default he will forcibly proceed against the said
Floating Island.”

TOLSTOY, “WAR AND PEACE.” 307 WORDS.

“But Count Rastopchin, who now shamed those who were leaving, now evacuated
government offices, now distributed good-for-nothing weapons among the drunken
riffraff, now took up icons, now forbade Augustin to evacuate relics and icons, now
confiscated all private carts, now transported the hot-air balloon constructed by
Leppich on a hundred and thirty-six carts, now hinted that he would burn Moscow,
now told how he had burned his own house and wrote a proclamation to the French in
which he solemnly reproached them for destroying his orphanage; now he assumed the
glory of having burned Moscow, now he renounced it, now he ordered the people to
catch all the spies and bring them to him, now he reproached the people for it, now
he banished all the French from Moscow, now he allowed Mme Aubert-Chalmet, the
center of all the French population of all Moscow, to remain in the city and
ordered the old and venerable postmaster general Klyucharev, who had done nothing
particularly wrong, to be arrested and exiled; now he gathered the people on the
Three Hills to fight the French, now, in order to be rid of those same people, he
turned them loose to murder a man and escaped through a back gate himself; now he
said he would not survive the misfortune of Moscow, now he wrote French verses in
an album about his part in the affair—this man did not understand the meaning of
the event that was taking place, but only wanted to do something himself, to
astonish someone or other, to accomplish something patriotically heroic, and, like
a boy, frolicked over the majestic and inevitable event of the abandoning and
burning of Moscow, and tried with his little hand now to encourage, now to stem the
flow of the enormous current of people which carried him along with it.”

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “THE GIFT.” 309 WORDS.

“He walked on toward the shop, but what he had just seen—whether because it had
given him a kindred pleasure, or because it had taken him unawares and jolted him
(as children in the hayloft fall into the resilient darkness)—released in him that
pleasant something which for several days now had been at the murky bottom of his
every thought, taking possession of him at the slightest provocation: my collection
of poems has been published; and when as now, his mind tumbled like this, that is,
when he recalled the fifty-odd poems that had just come out, he would skim in an
instant the entire book, so that in an instantaneous mist of its madly accelerated
music one could not make any readable sense of the flicking lines—the familiar
words would rush past, swirling amid violent foam (whose seething was transformed
into a mighty flowing motion if one fixed one’s eyes on it, as we used to do long
ago, looking down at it from a vibrating mill bridge until the bridge turned into a
ship’s stern: farewell!)—and this foam, and this flickering, and a separate verse
that rushed past all alone, shouting in wild ecstasy from afar, probably calling
him home, all of this, together with the creamy white of the cover, was merged in a
blissful feeling of exceptional purity … What am I doing! he thought, abruptly
coming to his senses and realizing that the first thing he had done upon entering
the next shop was to dump the change he had received at the tobacconist’s onto the
rubber islet in the middle of the glass counter, through which he glimpsed the
submerged treasure of flasked perfumes, while the salesgirl’s gaze, condescending
toward his odd behavior, followed with curiosity this absentminded hand paying for
a purchase that had not yet been named.”

MARTIN LUTHER KING, “A LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL.” 310 WORDS.

“But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and
drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen
curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast
majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of
poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue
twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old
daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been
advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told
that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority
beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her
personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you
have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do
white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive
and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of
your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in
and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name
becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your
last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected
title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you
are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect
next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever
fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find
it difficult to wait.”

RICHARD WRIGHT, “NATIVE SON.” 318 WORDS.

“It sounded suddenly directly above his head and when he looked it was not there
but went on tolling and with each passing moment he felt an urgent need to run and
hide as though the bell were sounding a warning and he stood on a street corner in
a red glare of light like that which came from the furnace and he had a big package
in his arms so wet and slippery and heavy that he could scarcely hold onto it and
he wanted to know what was in the package and he stopped near an alley corner and
unwrapped in and the paper fell away and he saw—it was his own head—his own head
lying with black face and half-closed eyes and lips parted with white teeth showing
and hair wet with blood and the red glare grew brighter like light shining down
from a red moon and red stars on a hot summer night and he was sweating and
breathless from running and the bell clanged so loud that he could hear the iron
tongue clapping against the metal sides each time it swung to and fro and he was
running over a street paved with black coal and his shoes kicked tiny lumps
rattling against tin cans and he knew that very soon he had to find some place to
hide but there was no place and in front of him white people were coming to ask
about the head from which the newspapers had fallen and which was now slippery with
blood in his naked hands and he gave up and stood in the middle of the street in
the red darkness and cursed the booming bell and the white people and felt that he
did not give a damn what happened to him and when the people closed in he hurled
the bloody head squarely into their faces dongdongdong….”

MALCOLM LOWRY, “UNDER THE VOLCANO.” 328 WORDS.

“It is a light blue moonless summer evening, but late, perhaps ten o’clock, with
Venus burning hard in daylight, so we are certainly somewhere far north, and
standing on this balcony, when from beyond along the coast comes the gathering
thunder of a long many-engineered freight train, thunder because though we are
separated by this wide strip of water from it, the train is rolling eastward and
the changing wind veers for a moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east,
like Swedenborg’s angels, under a sky clear save where far to the northeast over
distant mountains whose purple has faded lies a mass of almost pure white clouds,
suddenly, as by a light in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within by gold
lightning, yet you can hear no thunder, only the roar of the great train with its
engines and its wide shunting echoes as it advances from the hills into the
mountains: and then all at once a fishing boat with tall gear comes running round
the point like a white giraffe, very swift and stately, leaving directly behind it
a long silver scalloped rim of wake, not visibly moving inshore, but now stealing
ponderously beachward toward us, this scrolled silver rim of wash striking the
shore first in the distance, then spreading all along the curve of the beach, while
the floats, for these are timber driving floats, are swayed together, everything
jostled and beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked
silver, then little by little calm again, and you see the reflection of the remote
white thunderclouds in the water, and now the lightening within the white clouds in
deep water, as the fishing boat itself with a golden scroll of travelling light in
its silver wake beside it reflected from the cabin vanishes round the headland,
silence, and then again, within the white white distant alabaster thunderclouds
beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightening in the blue evening,
unearthly.”

JONATHAN FRANZEN, “THE CORRECTIONS.” 359 WORDS.

“He began a sentence: “I am–” but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence
became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of
the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped
for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t
quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger
that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren’t uniform,
weren’t an absence of light but a teeming corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a
studious teenager he’d encountered the word “crepuscular” in McKay’s Treasury of
English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the
word, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as
of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions
of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man
betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting
out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just
exit but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself,
lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became
marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space
between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between
one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and
could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part
of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the
grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken
little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d
entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where
Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods–“packing my suitcase,” he heard
himself say.”

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, “THE MARBLE FAUN.” 374 WORDS.

“When we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a long-decaying
corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and
a fungous growth overspreading all its more admirable features, left her in utter
weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably
paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential
pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the
sun never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs,–
left her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels,
or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and
multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases, which ascend from a ground-
floor of cook shops, cobblers’ stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a
middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists,
just beneath the unattainable sky,–left her, worn out with shivering at the
cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own substance the
ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night,–left her, sick at heart of
Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man’s integrity had endured
till now, and sick at stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad
cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil meats,–left her, disgusted with the pretence
of holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent,–left her, half
lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle of which has been used up
long ago, or corrupted by myriads of slaughters,–left her, crushed down in spirit
with the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future, –left her, in
short, hating her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the
infinite anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down,–when we have
left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by and by, that
our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and
are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our
home, than even the spot where we were born.”

MARCEL PROUST, “SWANN’S WAY.” 426 WORDS.

“All these things and, still more than these, the treasures which had come to the
church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such as the golden
cross wrought, it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb
of the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of
which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way to our
chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a
rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people’s supernatural
passage — all these things made of the church for me something entirely different
from the rest of the town; a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions
of space — the name of the fourth being Time — which had sailed the centuries with
that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across
and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch
from which the whole building had emerged triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities
of the eleventh century in the thickness of its walls, through which nothing could
be seen of the heavy arches, long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar,
except where, near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the
tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful gothic arcade
which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him
from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a countrified,
unmannerly and ill-dressed younger brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a
tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and
thrusting down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through
which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, ribbed
strongly as an immense bat’s wing of stone, Théodore or his sister would light up
for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert’s little daughter, in which a deep hole,
like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, “by a crystal lamp
which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own
accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and
with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried itself in the
stone, through which it had gently forced its way.”
JOSE SARAMAGO, “BLINDNESS.” 440 WORDS.
“The next day, while still in bed, the doctor’s wife said to her husband, We have
little food left, we’ll have to go out again, I thought that today I would go back
to the underground food store at the supermarket, the one I went to on the first
day, if nobody else has found it, we can get supplies for a week or two, I’m coming
with you and we’ll ask one or two of the others to come along as well, I’d rather
go with you alone, it’s easier, and there is less danger of getting lost, How long
will you be able to carry the burden of six helpless people, I’ll manage as long as
I can, but you are quite right, I’m beginning to get exhausted, sometimes I even
wish I were blind as well, to be the same as the others, to have no more
obligations than they have, We’ve got used to depending on you, If you weren’t
there, it would be like being struck with a second blindness, thanks to your eyes
we are a little less blind, I’ll carry on as long as I can, I can’t promise you
more than that, One day, when we realize that we can no longer do anything good and
useful we ought to have the courage simply to leave this world, as he said, Who
said that, The fortunate man we met yesterday, I am sure that he wouldn’t say that
today, there is nothing like real hope to change one’s opinions, He has that all
right, long may it last, In your voice there is a tone which makes me think you are
upset, Upset, why, As if something had been taken away from you, Are you referring
to what happened to the girl when we were at that terrible place, Yes, Remember it
was she who wanted to have sex with me, Memory is deceiving you, you wanted her,
Are you sure, I was not blind, Well, I would have sworn that, You would only
perjure yourself, Strange how memory can deceive us, In this case it is easy to
see, something that is offered to us is more ours than something we had to conquer,
But she didn’t ever approach me again, and I never approached her, If you wanted
to, you could find each other’s memories, that’s what memory is for, You are
jealous, No, I’m not jealous, I was not even jealous on that occasion, I felt sorry
for her and for you, and also for myself because I could not help you, How are we
fixed for water, Badly.”

HERMAN MELVILLE, “MOBY DICK.” 467 WORDS.

“Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if
imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and
though various nations have in some way recognized a certain royal preeminence in
this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the
White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and
the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal
standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger;
and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the
imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to
the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky
tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of
gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in
other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many
touching, noble things- the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among
the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest
pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice
in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens
drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august
religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the
Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the
altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a
snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the
sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless,
faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit
with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin
word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred
vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy
pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the
Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the
redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-
white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all
these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime,
there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which
strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.”

JORGE LUIS BORGES, “THE ALEPH.” 475 WORDS.

“I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of
America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a
splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching
themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them
reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years
before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes,
snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one
of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I
saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring
of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer
house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon
Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used
to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost
overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose
in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe
between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes
on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand;
I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase
in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on
a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the
ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing
table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed
letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I
worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once
deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw
the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every
point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in
the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I
felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose
name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable
universe.”

DONALD ANTRIM, “THE HUNDRED BROTHERS.” 522 WORDS.

“My brothers Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, Phil, Noah, William, Nick, Dennis,
Christopher, Frank, Simon, Saul, Jim, Henry, Seamus, Richard, Jeremy, Walter,
Jonathan, James, Arthur, Rex, Bertram, Vaughan, Daniel, Russel, and Angus; and the
triplets Herbert, Patrick, and Jeffrey; identical twins Michael and Abraham,
Lawrence and Peter, Winston and Charles, Scott and Samuel; and Eric, Donovan,
Roger, Lester, Larry, Clinton, Drake, Gregory, Leon, Kevin, and Jack–all born on
the same day, the twenty-third of May, though at different hours in separate years–
and the caustic graphomaniac, Sergio, whose scathing opinions appear with
regularity in the front-of-book pages of the more conservative monthlies, not to
mention on the liquid crystal screens that glow at night atop the radiant work
stations of countless bleary-eyed computer bulletinboard subscribers (among whom
our brother is known, affectionately, electronically, as Surge); and Albert, who is
blind; and Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; and clinically depressed
Anton, schizophrenic Irv, recovering addict Clayton; and Maxwell, the tropical
botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up
somehow; and Jason, Joshua, and Jeremiah, each vaguely gloomy in his own “lost boy”
way; and Eli, who spends solitary wakeful evenings in the tower, filling notebooks
with drawings–the artist’s multiple renderings for a larger work?–portraying the
faces of his brothers, including Chuck, the prosecutor; Porter, the diarist;
Andrew, the civil rights activist; Pierce, the designer of radically unbuildable
buildings; Barry, the good doctor of medicine; Fielding, the documentary-film
maker; Spencer, the spook with known ties to the State Department; Foster, the “new
millennium” psychotherapist; Aaron, the horologist; Raymond, who flies his own
plane; and George, the urban planner who, if you read the papers, you’ll recall,
distinguished himself, not so long ago, with that innovative program for
revitalizing the decaying downtown area (as “an animate interactive diorama
illustrating contemporary cultural and economic folkways”), only to shock and amaze
everyone, absolutely everyone, by vanishing with a girl named Jane and an overnight
bag packed with municipal funds in unmarked hundreds; and all the young fathers:
Seth, Rod, Vidal, Bennet, Dutch, Brice, Allan, Clay, Vincent, Gustavus, and Joe;
and Hiram, the eldest; Zachary, the Giant; Jacob, the polymath; Virgil, the
compulsive whisperer; Milton, the channeler of spirits who speak across time; and
the really bad womanizers: Stephen, Denzil, Forrest, Topper, Temple, Lewis, Mongo,
Spooner, and Fish; and, of course, our celebrated “perfect” brother, Benedict,
recipient of a medal of honor from the Academy of Sciences for work over twenty
years in chemical transmission of “sexual language” in eleven types of social
insects–all of us (except George, about whom there have been many rumors, rumors
upon rumors: he’s fled the vicinity, he’s right here under our noses, he’s using an
alias or maybe several, he has a new face, that sort of thing)–all my ninety-eight,
not counting George, brothers and I recently came together in the red library and
resolved that the time had arrived, finally, to stop being blue, put the past
behind us, share a light supper, and locate, if we could bear to, the missing urn
full of the old fucker’s ashes.”

ROBERTO BOLANO, “2666.” 554 WORDS.

“That same day Kessler was at Cerro Estrella and he walked around Colonia Estrella
and Colonia Hidalgo and explored the area along the Pueblo Azul highway and saw the
ranches empty like shoe boxes, solid structures, graceless, functionless, that
stood at the bends of the roads that ran into the Pueblo Azul highway, and then he
wanted to see the neighborhoods along the border, Colonia Mexico, next to El Adobe,
at which point you were back in the United States, the bars and restaurants and
hotels of Colonia Mexico and its main street, where there was a permanent thunder
of trucks and cars on their way to the border crossing, and then he made his
entourage turn south along Avenida General Sepulveda and the Cananea highway, where
they took a detour into Colonia La Vistosa, a place the police almost never
ventured, one of the inspectors told him, the one who was driving, and the other
one nodded sorrowfully, as if the absence of police in Colonia La Vistosa and
Colonia Kino and Colonia Remedies Mayor was a shameful stain that they, zealous
young men, bore with sorrow, and why sorrow? well, because impunity pained them,
they said, whose impunity? the impunity of the gangs that controlled the drug trade
in these godforsaken neighborhoods, something that made Kessler think, since in
principle, looking out the car window at the fragmented landscape, it was hard to
imagine any of the residents buying drugs, easy to imagine them using, but hard,
very hard, to imagine them buying, digging in their pockets to come up with enough
change to make a purchase, something easy enough to imagine in the black and
Hispanic ghettos up north, neighborhoods that looked placid in comparison to this
dismal chaos, but the two inspectors nodded, their strong, young jaws, that’s
right, there’s lots of coke around here and all the filth that comes with it, and
then Kessler looked out again at the landscape, fragmented or in the constant
process of fragmentation, like a puzzle repeatedly assembled and disassembled, and
told the driver to take him to the illegal dump El Chile, the biggest illegal dump
in Santa Teresa, bigger than the city dump, where waste was disposed of not only by
the maquiladora trucks but also by garbage trucks contracted by the city and some
private garbage trucks and pickups, subcontracted or working in areas that public
services didn’t cover, and then the car was back on paved streets and they seemed
to head the way they’d come, returning to Colonia La Vistosa and the highway, but
then they turned down a wider street, just as desolate, where even the brush was
covered with a thick layer of dust, as if an atomic bomb had dropped nearby and no
one had noticed, except the victims, thought Kessler, but they didn’t count because
they’d lost their minds or were dead, even though they still walked and stared,
their eyes and stares straight out of a Western, the stares of Indians or bad guys,
of course, in other words lunatics, people living in another dimension, their gazes
no longer able to touch us, we’re aware of them but they don’t touch us, they don’t
adhere to our skin, they shoot straight through us, thought Kessler as he moved to
roll down the window.”

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, OBLIVION, “MISTER SQUISHY.” 562 WORDS.

“Schmidt had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some
perspective on himself, and he knew that a certain percentage of his reaction to
the way these older men coolly inspected their cuticles or pinched at the crease in
the trouser of the topmost leg as they sat back on the coccyx joggling the foot of
their crossed leg was just his insecurity, that he felt somewhat sullied and
implicated by the whole enterprise of contemporary marketing and that this
sometimes manifested via projection as the feeling that people he was trying to
talk as candidly as possible to always believed he was making a sales pitch or
trying to manipulate them in some way, as if merely being employed, however
ephemerally, in the great grinding US marketing machine had somehow colored his
whole being and that something essentially shifty or pleading in his expression
now always seemed inherently false or manipulative and turned people off, and not
just in his career – which was not his whole existence, unlike so many at Team Δy,
or even that terribly important to him; he had a vivid and complex inner life, and
introspected a great deal – but in his personal affairs as well, and that somewhere
along the line his professional marketing skills had metastasized through his whole
character so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his
courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart to
her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her involved
elements of both professional and highly personal regard, and that he spent a great
deal more time thinking about her than she probably had any idea he did, and that
if there were anything at all he could ever do to make her life happier or easier
or more satisfying or fulfilling he hoped she’d just say the word, for that is all
she would have to do, say the word or snap her thick fingers or even just look at
him in a meaningful way, and he’d be there, instantly and with no reservations at
all, he would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably just wanting to
sleep with her or fondle or harass her, or as having some creepy obsession with
her, or as maybe even having a small creepy secretive shrine to her in one corner
of the unused second bedroom of his condominium, consisting of personal items
fished out of her cubicle’s wastebasket or the occasional dry witty little notes
she passed him during especially deadly or absurd Team Δy staff meetings, or that
his home Apple PowerBook’s screensaver was an Adobe-brand 1440-dpi blowup of a
digital snapshot of the two of them with his arm over her shoulder and just part of
the arm and shoulder of another Team Δy Field-worker with his arm over her shoulder
from the other side at a Fourth of July picnic that A.C. Romney-Jaswat & Assoc. had
thrown for its research subcontractors at Navy Pier two years past, Darlene holding
her cup and smiling in such a way as to show almost as much upper gum as teeth, the
ale’s cup’s red digitally enhanced to match her lipstick and the small scarlet
rainbow she often wore just right of center as a sort of personal signature or
statement.”

THOMAS BERNHARD, “CORRECTION.” 720 WORDS.

“The atmosphere in Hoeller’s house was still heavy, most of all with the
circumstances of Roithamer’s suicide, and seemed from the moment of my arrival
favorable to my plan of working on Roithamer’s papers there, specifically in
Hoeller’s garret, sifting and sorting Roithamer’s papers and even, as I suddenly
decided, simultaneously writing my own account of my work on these papers, as I
have here begun to do, aided by having been able to move straight into Hoeller’s
garret without any reservations on Hoeller’s part, even though the house had other
suitable accommodations, I deliberately moved into that four-by-five-meter garret
Roithamer was always so fond of, which was so ideal, especially in his last years,
for his purposes, where I could stay as long as I liked, it was all the same to
Hoeller, in this house built by the headstrong Hoeller in defiance of every rule of
reason and architecture right here in the Aurach gorge, in the garret which Hoeller
had designed and built as if for Roithamer’s purposes, where Roithamer, after
sixteen years in England with me, had spent the final years of his life almost
continuously, and even prior to that he had found it convenient to spend at least
his nights in the garret, especially while he was building the Cone for his sister
in the Kobernausser forest, all the time the Cone was under construction he no
longer slept at home in Altensam but always and only in Hoeller’s garret, it was
simply in every respect the ideal place for him during those last years when he,
Roithamer, never went straight home to Altensam from England, but instead went
every time to Hoeller’s garret, to fortify himself in its simplicity (Hoeller
house) for the complexity ahead (Cone), it would not do to go straight to Altensam
from England, where each of us, working separately in his own scientific field, had
been living in Cambridge all those years, he had to go straight to Hoeller’s
garret, if he did not follow this rule which had become a cherished habit, the
visit to Altensam was a disaster from the start, so he simply could not let himself
go directly from England to Altensam and everything connected with Altensam,
whenever he had not made the detour via Hoeller’s house, to save time, as he
himself admitted, it had been a mistake, so he no longer made the experiment of
going to Altensam without first stopping at Hoeller’s house, in those last years,
he never again went home without first visiting Hoeller and Hoeller’s family and
Hoeller’s house, without first moving into Hoeller’s garret, to devote himself for
two or three days to such reading as he could do only in Hoeller s garret, of
subject matter that was not harmful but helpful o him, books and articles he could
read neither in Altensam or in England, and to thinking and writing what he found
possible to think and write neither in England nor in Altensam, here I discovered
Hegel, he always said, over and over again, it was here that I really delved into
Schopenhauer for the first time, here that I could read, for the first time,
Goethe’sElective Affinities and The Sentimental Journey, without distraction and
with a clear head, it was here, in Hoeller’s garret, that I suddenly gained access
to ideas to which my mind had been sealed for decades before I came to this garret,
access, he wrote, to the most essential ideas, the most important for me, the most
necessary to my life, here in Hoeller’s garret, he wrote, everything became
possible for me, everything that had always been impossible for me outside
Hoeller’s garret, such as letting myself be guided by my intellectual inclinations
and to develop my natural aptitudes accordingly, and to get on with my work,
everywhere else I had always been hindered in developing my aptitudes but in
Hoeller’s garret I could always develop them most consistently, here everything was
congenial to my way of thinking, here I could always indulge myself in exploring
all my intellectual possibilities, here my intellectual possibilities, here in
Hoeller’s garret my head, my mind, my whole constitution were suddenly relieved
from all the outside world’s oppression, the most incredible things were suddenly
no longer incredible, the most impossible (thinking!) no longer impossible.”

MARCEL PROUST, “REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST.” 958 WORDS.

“Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the
discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one
day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the
next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his
head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die,
each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when
the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the
sympathy–at times from the society–of their fellows, in whom they inspire only
disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to
flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in
themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love
(a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that
poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love)
springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable
malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their
race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries),
shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who
do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their
condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism
that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been
invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral
characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of
all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to
the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him
who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and
even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly
denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those
who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with
a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to
excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis)
of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was
one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without
reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-
Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has
allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every
example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that
it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted
moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as
theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily
excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more
powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity
of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary,
and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another,
recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or
deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street,
in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the
suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence,
in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them
obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with
the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to
them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic,
anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with
a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished
him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party
goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human
whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself,
insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its
adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison,
on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and
perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them
by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy
by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years
until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then,
obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on
which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they
would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their
vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint
which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard
not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it
does not appear a vice.”

STEVEN MILLHAUSER, “HOME RUN.” 1147 WORDS.

“Bottom of the ninth, two out, game tied, runners at the corners, the count full on
McCluskey, the fans on their feet, this place is going wild, outfield shaded in to
guard against the blooper, pitcher looks in, shakes off the sign, a big lead off
first, they’re not holding him on, only run that matters is the man dancing off
third, shakes off another sign, McCluskey asking for time, steps out of the box,
tugs up his batter’s glove, knocks dirt from his spikes, it’s a cat ‘n’ mouse game,
break up his rhythm, make him wait, now the big guy’s back in the box, down in his
crouch, the tall lefty toes the rubber, looks in, gives the nod, will he go with
the breaking ball, maybe thinking slider, third baseman back a step, catcher sets
up inside, pitcher taking his time, very deliberate out there, now he’s ready, the
set, the kick, he deals, it’s a fastball, straight down the pipe, McCluskey swings,
a tremendous rip, he crushes it, the crowd is screaming, the centerfielder back,
back, angling toward right, tons of room out there in no man’s land, still going
back, he’s at the track, that ball is going, going, he’s at the wall, looking up,
that ball is gone, see ya, hasta la vista baby, McCluskey goes yard, over the
three-hundred-ninety-foot mark in right center, game over, he creamed it, that baby
is gone and she ain’t comin back anytime soon, sayonara, the crowd yelling, the
ball still carrying, the stands going crazy, McCluskey rounding second, the ball
still up there, way up there, high over the right-centerfield bleachers, headed for
the upper deck, talk about a tape-measure shot, another M-bomb from the Big M, been
doing it all year, he’s rounding third, ball still going, still going, that ball
was smoked, a no doubter, wait a minute wait a minute oh oh oh it’s outta here,
that ball is out of the park, cleared the upper deck, up over the Budweiser sign,
Jimmy can you get me figures on that, he hammered it clean outta here, got all of
it, can you believe it, an out of the parker, hot diggity, slammed it a country
mile, the big guy’s crossing the plate, team’s all over him, the crowd roaring,
what’s that Jimmy, Jimmy are you sure, I’m being told it’s a first, that’s right a
first, no one’s ever socked one out before, the Clusker really got around on it,
looking fastball all the way, got the sweet part of the bat on it, launched a
rocket, oh baby did he scald it, I mean he drilled it, the big guy is strong but
it’s that smooth swing of his, the King of Swing, puts his whole body into it, hits
with his legs, he smashed it, a Cooperstown clout, right on the screws, the ball
still going, unbelievable, up past the Goodyear Blimp, see ya later alligator, up
into the wild blue yonder, still going, ain’t nothing gonna stop that baby, they’re
walking McCluskey back to the dugout, fans swarming all over the field, they’re
pointing up at the sky, the ball still traveling, up real high, that ball is wayway
outta here, Jimmy what have you got, going, going, hold on, what’s that Jimmy, I’m
told the ball has gone all the way through the troposphere, is that a fact, now how
about that, the big guy hit it a ton, really skyed it, up there now in the
stratosphere, good golly Miss Molly, help me out here Jimmy, stratosphere starts at
six miles and goes up 170,000 feet, man did he ever jack it outta here, a dinger
from McSwinger, a whopper from the Big Bopper, going, going, the stands emptying
out, the ball up in the mesosphere, the big guy blistered it, he powdered it, the
ground crew picking up bottles and paper cups and peanut shells and hot dog
wrappers, power-washing the seats, you can bet people’ll be talking about this one
for a long time to come, he plastered that ball, a pitch right down Broadway, tried
to paint the inside corner but missed his spot, you don’t want to let the big guy
extend those arms, up now in the exosphere, way up there, never seen anything like
it, the ball carrying well all day but who would’ve thought, wait a minute, hold on
a second, holy cow it’s left the earth’s atmosphere, so long it’s been good ta know
ya, up there now in outer space, I mean that ball is outta here, bye bye birdie,
still going, down here at the park the stands are empty, sun gone down, moon’s up,
nearly full, it’s a beautiful night, temperature seventy-three, another day game
tomorrow then out to the West coast for a tough three-game series, the ball still
going, looks like she’s headed for the moon, talk about a moon shot, man did he
ever paste it outta here, higher, deeper, going, going, it’s gone past the moon,
you can kiss that baby goodbye, goodnight Irene I’ll see you in my dreams, the big
guy got good wood on it, right on the money, swinging for the downs, the ball still
traveling, sailing past Mars, up through the asteroid belt, you gotta love it, past
Jupiter, see ya Saturn, so long Uranus, arrivederci Neptune, up there now in the
Milky Way, a round-tripper to the Big Dipper, a galaxy shot, a black-hole blast,
how many stars are we talking about Jimmy, Jimmy says two hundred billion, that’s
two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, a nickel for every star and you can
stop worrying about your 401K, the ball still traveling, out past the Milky Way and
headed on into intergalactic space, hooo did he ever whack it, he shellacked it, a
good season but came up short in the playoffs, McCluskey’ll be back next year, the
ball out past the Andromeda galaxy, going, going, the big guy mashed it, he clob-
bobbered it, wham-bam-a-rammed it, he’s looking good in spring training, back with
that sweet swing, out past the Virgo supercluster with its thousands of galaxies,
that ball was spanked, a Big Bang for the record book, a four-bagger with swagger,
out past the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster, still going, out past the Aquarius
supercluster, thousands and millions of superclusters out there, McCluskey still
remembers it, he’s coaching down in Triple A, the big man a sensation in his day,
the ball still out there, still climbing, sailing out toward the edge of the
observable universe, the edge receding faster than the speed of light, the ball
still going, still going, he remembers the feel of the wood in his hands, the good
sound of it as he swung, smell of pine tar, bottom of the ninth, two on, two out, a
summer day.”

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, “THE PALE KING.” 1185 WORDS.

“Part of what kept him standing in the restive group of men waiting authorization
to enter the airport was a kind of paralysis that resulted from Sylvanshine’s
reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria 047 REC – the issue of whether
the REC sent a van for transfers or whether Sylvanshine would have to take a cab
from the little airport had not been conclusively resolved – and then how to arrive
and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out
his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials
then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented
for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was
either in walking distance or would require getting another cab – except the
telephone in the alleged apartment wasn’t connected yet and he considered the
prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment window complex were
at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he’d taken to the apartment to wait
for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the
cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a
quick spot check of the apartment’s condition and suitability instead of it being a
ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back
of the Angler’s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in
the apartment and not responding to the driver’s knock, or his ring if the
apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynold’s current apartment in Martinsburg
most assuredly did not, or the driver’s queries/threats through the apartment door,
a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine’s awareness only because a number of
independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule
C losses under the provisio “Losses Through Theft of Service” and detailed this
type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten
attachments required to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas
were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and tip and perhaps even a certain amount in
advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re
the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi
driver – a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their sumdged
returns’ very low tip-income-vs-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in
Philly had indicated – wouldn’t simply speed away with Sylvanshine’s money,
creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a
percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone,
famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynold’s
counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach
roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could to unpack
in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet
on the unfinished floor in the possible presence of exotic Midwestern bugs, to say
nothing of putting in the hour of CPA exam review he’d promised himself this
morning when he’d overslept slightly and then encountered last-minute packing
problems that had canceled out the firmly scheduled hour of morning CPA review
before one of the unmarked Systems vans arrived to take him and his bags out
through Harpers Ferry and Ball’s Bluff to the airport, to say even less about any
kind of systematic organization and mastery of the voluminous Post, Duty,
Personnel, and Systems Protocols materials he should be receiving promptly after
check-in and forms processing at the Post, which any reasonable Personnel Director
would expect a new examiner to have thoroughly internalized before reporting for
the first actual day interacting with REC examiners, and which there was no way in
any real world that Sylanshine could expect himself to try to review and
internalize on either a sixteen-hour fast or a night on the pallet with his damp
raincoat as a pillow – he had been unable to pack the special contoured orthotic
pillow for his neck’s chronic pinched or inflamed nerve; it would have required its
own suitcase and thereby exceeded the baggage limit and incurred an exorbitant
surcharge which Reynolds refused to let Sylvanshine pay out of same principle –
with the additional problem of securing any sort of substantive breakfast or return
ride to the REC in the morning without a phone, or how without a phone one was
supposed to even try to verify whether and when the apartment phone was going to be
activated, plus of course the ominous probability of oversleeping the next morning
due to both travel fatigue and his not having packed his traveler’s alarm clock –
or at any rate not having been certain that he’d packed in instead of allowing it
to go into one of the three large cartons that he had packed and labeled but done a
hasty, slipshod job of writing out Contents Lists for the boxes to refer to when
unpacking them in Peoria, and which Reynolds had pledged to insert into the
Service’s Support Branch shipping mechanism at roughly the same time Sylvanshine’s
flight was scheduled to depart from Dulles, which meant two or possibly even three
days before the cartons with all the essentials Sylvanshine had not been able to
fit into his bags arrived, and even then they would arrive at the REC and it was as
yet unclear how Claude would then them home to the apartment – the realization
about the traveler’s alarm having been the chief cause of Sylvanshine’s having to
unlock and open all the carefully packed luggage that morning on arising already
half an hour late, to try to locate or verify the inclusion of the portable alarm,
which he had failed to do – the whole thing presenting such a cyclone of logistical
problems and complexities that Sylvanshine was forced to some some Thought Stopping
right there on the wet tarmac surrounded by restive breathers, turning 360-degrees
several times and trying to merge his own awareness with the panoramic vista, which
except for airport-related items was uniformly featureless and old-coin gray and so
remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped on with some
cosmic boot, visibility in all directions limited only by the horizon, which was
the same general color and texture as the sky and created the specular impression
of being in the center of some huge and stagnant body of water, an oceanic
impression so literally obliterating that Sylvanshine was cast or propelled back in
on himself and felt again the edge of the shadow of the wing of Total Terror and
Disqualification pass over him, the knowledge of his being surely and direly ill-
suited for whatever lay ahead, and of its being only a matter of time before this
fact emerged and was made manifest to all those present in the moment that
Sylvanshine finally, and forever, lost it.”

RODERICK MOODY-CORBETT, “PARSE.” 1203 WORDS.

“You know that you will see him again, at least you have told yourself not to