Suppose a time in which people found themselves struggling to read or write; in any way still resembling the shapes such pleasure (and pain) had once taken before. Suppose our days became full of the aching pulse of various great unknowns, and we took to our devices to try to make sense of it all.
Over Twitter, on Instagram and in WhatsApp threads, we wondered: “Will I ever read again? Will my concentration, for the love of mercy, please come back? Will the desire for book and pen fly back down; from whichever hidden branch to which it fled?”
Suppose, in the midst of it all, some writers used their words to scare and belittle some people. Suppose a moment in which words took on new meanings; when we didn’t know if we should be silent; or scream out, at the top of our lungs. Suppose a Sentence shines the light down on words at a time when they have never felt more burning.
This book is about sentences, but it is also about writers; those crafts-folk that string words together, like lanterns, across this inky, squally sea of existence. Each chapter begins with a single sentence Brian Dillon was drawn to and copied down, in notebooks over the years – “out of a teeming sky of inscriptions, these are the few that shine more brightly” – and now offers up to us, with his singular, remarkable exploration of it.
Content wise: females outweigh males. We are given the living alongside the dead. There is, if I’ve followed the right vein of light, a definite sense of each section leading on naturally to the next in some indefinable way (although they have only actually been arranged chronologically). Overall the choices tally an incredibly diverse, intriguing sum, from across an impressive sweep of time and place. There are two Annes and an Annie, an infamous playwright, and the best English writer of all time; outrageous genius and unrivalled chaos receive identical treatment.
Sentences have been offered up for analysis – like DNA, like an old photograph found inside an atlas at a flea market, like the markings on the wing of a moth; Dillon approaches language like a child outdoors before indifference has kicked in. The writing is honest, hungry and full of wonder. We are met with variety everywhere in Dillon’s choices: writer and subject, style and length, and, most affectingly – his own views on it all – the 29th writer; tying all the sentences together so expertly, with fine red thread.
Some writers seem intent on stating how fiercely easy it all is: “Ah sure lookit if you’re meant to write you’ll find the way”. Others – held back by sexism, racism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, demands placed on them or more – tell a very different story; what they’re still forced to go through to get their sentences into the world. The world of words is not a fair one by any stretch, and this book comes at a cusp moment: finally steps are being taken to redress the balance. Dillon shows us that there has never been anything simple or fair about the writing, reading, or study of words.
Where Essayism focused on the long shadows certain writing casts, here we find him pinpointing the light sources. Why do writers write? What has come about – at whatever faraway point in their lives – that has encouraged, enabled (forced?) these individuals to line their words up beside one another and make their sentence?
There are sections in the book which have left me desperately wanting more; parts where Dillon focuses in on minutiae, with his eye glass, on things that glimmer, in ways which had not, at first glance, revealed themselves. He dissects the word “wrought”, for instance, taking it apart as though it were an unidentifiable insect and we are his rapt apprentices: he is “reminding us why we should care”. If the author ever writes a book on solitary words I shall devour it. The way he takes apart the written wor(l)d is exquisite.
There is great use of the question mark in this book – it’s how the author’s humility and humanity take up residence in the work. The chapter where Dillon mentions the death of his mother, and its impact on his reading, affected me more in one sentence, than entire books on grief have done: “Can a sentence grieve as well as tell us about grief?”
I think of Woolf’s description of words in The Waves – moving “through the air in flocks” and of Dillon’s spur for this book – “I went chasing eclipses: those moments of reading when the light changes . . . and you find you have to look twice, more than twice”, and I see them merge. This exceptional book is the sky after an eclipse, full of silvery words; dancing, like bright fledglings.
