I’m going to share two sentences (one of which is a question) from the opening of a book called Figuring by Maria Popova. As I share them, I’m going to think about what happens when a sentence extends for a whole page and why writers sometimes choose to do that. (These particular sentences do not have much to do with children’s literature per se, but they do have something to do with craft and with everything that’s happening now in the heartbreaking, exhausting, mind-bending month that is June 2020.)
“All of it - the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance's velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown, every copper atom composing the disc that carried arias abroad the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and every oak splinter of the floor boards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the sheen on the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo’s fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her, all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality - it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Firth Symphony, no larger than the dot levitating over the small i, the ‘I’ lowered from the pedestal of ego.
How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness?”
Brainpickings.org - Maria Popova’s treasure trove of a blog. Here’s just one example of a post that weaves together so much: A Poem for Peter: A Lyrical Illustrated Tribute to Ezra Jack Keats and the Making of the First Mainstream Children’s Book Starring a Black Child