A Uniquely Clunky Sentence Is A Joy Forever

I have tried over the past year and change to find a succinct way to tell this story and instead only keep coming up with longer and more elaborate versions. So: way back in law school I read a lot of John Buchan novels. If you are not familiar with John Buchan, know that he wrote a series of thrillers, one of which was made into a Hitchcock movie, and that he was also Governor General of Canada. Reading Buchan was not the first time I had heard of him; when I was a small child I had a set of E. Nesbit books published by (I think) Puffin and in the back pages they would advertise other books for young readers and Buchan was basically always in there along with, I’m pretty sure, H. Rider Haggard’s She, which paints a somewhat strange picture of what Puffin thought small children needed, book-wise. The John Buchan books are actually pretty good even if Buchan himself was just as high on British imperialism and its associated tenets as his day job might lead you to expect. I can’t remember why I started reading Buchan, but I suspect it was because I found him at the used bookstore I went to in those days, which mostly sold books from the estates of dead professors and was staffed by an astonishingly handsome guy whom I once overheard on the phone with a friend saying, “Yeah, we broke up because she wanted to start a family and I wanted to start a revolution.” It was one in a line of great bookstores I have known, and also I enjoyed the vague feeling of cosplaying as a well-educated white guy from the ‘50s, the kind of guy who would turn to John Buchan in his leisure hours. I chain smoked, which really sold the bit. I read the Buchan books and liked them, if not as much as the advertisements in Puffin had led me to believe I would. Maybe you had to be a small child. But I read them one after another, checking them out of the university library from a section in the stacks where I never saw anyone else, taking them on the bus trip upstate to spend Christmas with my grandmother. In my recollection it is late at night at my grandmother’s apartment, snow on the ground outside, and I am reading one of these books and I am stopped dead because I am reading a sentence I have read before. It is a sentence describing the beauty of some birds—I remember them as geese—flying in a way that invokes the evening sky and the black wings against it followed by a very prosaic but also precise rendering of how much fat these birds put on before winter or how far they can fly or something.

Read it at Defector ↗

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