‘A prose you can control’

 Long, long ago, a bunch of newspaper editors were inexplicably herded into a conference room and forced to sit through a lecture delivered by me. The topic was good writing.

I projected the opening sentence of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici onto the screen. I pointed out that Religio Medici is one of the great works of English literature and that its opening sentence is a showstopper. It’s also 204 words long.

I stopped talking and gave the editors three minutes of silence to contemplate the sentence. When it became evident that more time was needed for the editors to grasp what Sir Thomas was saying, I added a couple of minutes of extra time, as they do in soccer. When it became evident that yet more time was needed, I made a plea for short sentences.

Years later, Verlyn Klinkenborg made the case far better than I did that day.

 

Why short sentences?

They’ll sound strange for a while until you can hear

what they’re capable of.

But they carry you back to a prose you can control,

To a stage in education where your diction — your

vocabulary — was under control too.

 

For the truly curious, here’s Sir Thomas’s sentence:

 

For my Religion, though there be severall circumstances that might perswade the world I have none at all, as the generall scandal of my profession, the naturall course of my studies, the indifferency of my behaviour, and discourse in matters of Religion, neither violently defending one, nor with the common ardor of contention opposing another; yet in despight hereof I dare, without usurpation, assume the honorable stile of a Christian: not that I merely owe this title to the Font, my education, or the Clime wherein I was borne, as being bred up either to confirme those principles my Parents instilled into my unwary understanding; or by a generall consent proceed in the Religion of my Countrey; but that having in my riper yeares, and confirmed judgement, seene and examined all, I finde my selfe obliged by the principles of Grace, and the law of mine owne reason, to embrace no other name than this; neither doth herein my zeale so farre make me forget the generall charitie I owe unto humanity, as rather to hate then pity Turkes, Infidels, and (what is worse) the Jewes, rather contenting my selfe to enjoy that happy stile, then maligning those who refuse so glorious a title.   

 

Sir Thomas probably wrote that sentence in 1636. He often was thought-provoking, disturbing, outrageously wrong and interesting. I think he could control a 204-word sentence. Most of us cannot.

• Sources: Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several short sentences about writing; New York: Vintage Books, 2012, p. 9.

Sir Thomas Browne, Selected Writings, edited by Sir Geoffrey Keynes; The University of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 7.

Thom Gunn and the good life

The poet Thom Gunn wrote to a friend: 

I can hardly imagine a life more to my taste than mine.

 

I love that remark. When you’re talking about a good life, taste is important. A lot of what made Gunn’s life good for him would not make life good for me. 

I admire Gunn’s drive to live a life in accord with his own values. It seems to me that’s a large part of what a good life is: living by one’s own values, rather by someone else’s.

What’s blurry to me is the distinction between taste and other kinds of values. I understand that some people can made a kind of culture out of motorcycles. But I can’t, and it doesn’t seem to me that’s just a matter of taste. I’d have to be a different person — have a different temperament, a different personality — to pull that off.

I almost want to talk of human natures, rather than human nature.

• Source: Dwight Garner, “In ‘The Letters of Thom Gunn,’ an Unusual Mix of Pleasures”; The New York Times, May 16, 2022.

Writers and letter writers

 I’m a fan of letter writers. I think Roy Bedichek’s letters are among the minor wonders of literature. And I hope, before long, to at least dip into the letters of Oliver Sacks.

Sacks surprises people in many ways. The number of his letters surprised me. He wrote something like 35,000. His editor estimated they ran to 200,000 pages.

I’ve heard people talk of writer’s block as if it were a universal affliction, something experienced by every writer at some point. I think letter writers might be exempt — at least some of them.

• Sources: William M. Chase, “Tumult and sympathy: The letters of Oliver Sacks”; Commonweal, Aug. 7, 2025.

Oliver Sacks, Letters, edited by Kate Edgar; New York: Knopf, 2024.

A poem that was also a brief

 One of the strangest poems in American literature is “My Case.” It’s a poem but also a legal brief. It’s by Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President Garfield in 1881. It begins: 

Today, before my God

I stand,

A patriot and a Christian man;

Condemned, by men to die;

For Obeying,

God’s Command.

 

As a legal brief, “My Case” failed. Guiteau was executed.

I don’t think “My Case” is successful as a poem either. But saying that a poem failed requires one to say what bit of work the poem should have done. Saying what a poem is — or saying what work it does — is a notoriously difficult task.

Still, if I were ever asked to teach a course on poetry, I think I’d start here. I’d begin with a failed poem, a poem that didn’t work — in my judgment.

To me, this poem has a defect: It’s not convincing. That, at least, is a place to start an inquiry about what sort of things a poem must try to do.

I never heard “My Case” discussed as a work of literature or of jurisprudence. As a historical footnote, I wish it were better known. Although Guiteau was mentally ill, he was able to buy a gun, a Webley .442 revolver. Although Guiteau was mentally ill, the courts found that justice would be served by executing him.

The alert historian might detect some recurring themes.

• “Charles Guiteau’s reasons for assassinating President Garfield, 1882” is available at the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History:

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/charles-guiteaus-reasons-assassinating-president

A transcription of the poem is here:

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/t-06319.pdf

Toccoa Falls and Currahee Mountain

 The Wise Woman and I are markers of special occasions. Years ago, we made trips to the opera and symphony. Now we’re more likely to visit natural wonders. We stayed in Toccoa, a town of about 9,000 in northeastern Georgia, not far from the South Carolina line.

The falls on Toccoa Creek drop 186 feet into a pool. We sat and listened for a long time. Turkey vultures were roosting in a dead tree on the bluff. They’d take off from the tree and achieve soaring altitude immediately. It was wonderful watching them climb into the clear sky almost effortlessly, floating on the currents.

Currahee Mountain, just south of town, was the site of Camp Toccoa, where Col. Bob Sink trained airborne troopers during World War II. If you’ve read or seen Band of Brothers, you know about the camp at the base of the mountain and the long road up. Sink used to say, “Three miles up; three miles down.”

We decided half the route would be enough for us, so we missed the summit. We parked by the few barracks that remain and headed up the mountain, moving much slower than the soldiers of my father’s generation. The wind was blowing, as wind tends to do on mountains. We listened as we walked.

The small ways we practice

 I like to get up before the house wakes up. I like to drink coffee and think. 

I’m aware of the great traditions that teach students to sit correctly, to become aware of their breathing, to empty their minds. But I like black coffee. Instead of emptying my mind, I try to pay attention to what comes up, to see if anything of interest is caught in the current, floating down the stream.

I like these lines from Gunilla Norris:

 

Each of us must construct the small ways

that we scaffold our silence.

In the end we must simply practice.

 

• Source: Gunilla Norris, Inviting Silence: Universal Principles of Meditation; Goldens Bridge, N.Y.: BlueBridge, 2004, p. 46.

A great pastime

 You go into the library to browse. You pick up six books and head to a table. You thumb through the first four and are mildly interested. Then you open the fifth, and a part of the world that had seemed forbidding suddenly opens to you.

That’s the author-reader connection. Ray Bradbury called it the feeling that you are meeting someone you are destined to meet. It was destiny that led you, the reader, to this author. Bradbury chuckled at the idea, but I bet many readers will recognize it. One author speaks to you in a way nobody else does. Tolstoy was getting at something similar when he wrote that a work of art communicates in a profound way.

I’m interested in Bradbury in part because his interests, tastes and instincts were different from mine. But for all that difference, we were both graduates of the public library.

We’d agree on this: Browsing is one of humanity’s great pastimes. May there always be stacks to browse.

• Source: Ray Bradbury gave his lecture “Telling the Truth” at The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, April 2001. A recording is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W-r7ABrMYU