🧹 TREE 756: Parents and torturers and…
I’m reading Martin Amis’ London Fields. I’m far enough in to know the writing is superb, not far enough to know if the story is going to be awesome.
I’m far enough in to share this sentence on page 20 in a paragraph describing a very colicky child:
‘Only parents and torturers… are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief’ is already good. He could have stopped there and I would have been pleased and amused. But he keeps pressing into the darkness until he reaches absurdity: ‘Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.’
When you have accomplished a good thing, you can, if you choose, push it further. You might push too hard and send your good thing off a precipice into the sea of ruin. (I’ve done that with drawings before.) Or you might go just far enough and end up balanced on the edge in the genius zone with Martin Amis and the janitors of holocausts.
After this, you’ll be able to handle anything Wednesday throws at you.
Grow slowly
Jeff
Love this observation, Jeff, and what a sentence!! You know the writers’ phrase Kill Your Darlings? This is like: ok yeah, I’ll kill them but then I’ll electrocute them into something else entirely.
That is a superb sentence! And a great lesson drawn from it.