Words, Those Vanishing Squiggles

The Gettysburg Address is notable as much for its brevity as for its substance and eloquence. And rightly so. It has the lyricism and concision of great poetry. The speaker before him couldn’t say in two hours what Lincoln said in two minutes. His few words foreshadowed the end of florid oratory and ushered in the notion that less is more.

After WW I we buried ornamentation along with twenty million soldiers. The lost generation of the twenties had no patience for long-winded sentences. Public discourse was aligned with the staccato of the Jazz Age and Gershwin’s Rhapsody.

Hemingway wrote the shortest short story ever in two sentences: Baby shoes for sale. Never used.  

And here we are speaking in clipped blurts. We’re making good time on our way to nowhere. Fast food, Quick Lube, In and Out Burger, pinched minimalism. We have commuted our sentences to a vocabulary of the patriarchy: Spit it out. Did you, or didn’t you? Shut up. What have we got? Bottom line, how much…. all stripped for transactions. Soon we will settle for shrugs and grunts, nods and frowns.

My impulse is to push back. Why, I ask? The well-turned sentence can be a thing of beauty. It got Henry James reinvited as a constant dinner guest back in the day.

My mind jumps from Henry James to a street like National Blvd., the way it meanders in its elongation. It digresses and vanishes as if it lost its thread and then reappears just in time for its eulogy. Both James’ sentences and National demand our attention. You cannot skim or take your eye off the street sign. They challenge our perceptual span. National, you are a sentence with a dozen commas, (really, very) dense with adverbs and dripping with adjectives till they die from polysyllabic exhaustion. I shall call you a trickster, appearing and disappearing, like a great idea that explains everything, breaking the linear sequential in your fits and starts.

And what’s wrong with that? Forget your vertical thumb. National, you are a horizontal thumb. We have words, don’t you know? Words for nuance, for precision and rhythm, for flavor and grace. National, you are a trail through the thick, dodging what once was the La Cienega swamp, an equestrian trail around those brambles and boulders …before they paved you, tributaries and all.

Bless you National Blvd, infuriating as you can be. One can take the offramp and leave the unrelenting rush of life, take a subversive turn, meet oneself coming and going and ponder how once he was a Euclidean line and is now a labyrinth in the wonderment of life.

There is life yet in the bathwater we threw out. The more we discard words from public discourse the greater their value when a full sentence shows up as an artifact from a distant time. There are some of us who crave the long-winded, winding many-splendored ways down the road and lush progression down the page.