Meditation over a sentence

Here’s a beautiful and intriguing literary game to play from the always thoughtful Letizia. It will make you consider not just individual sentences but how carefully they are placed in you favourite novels. Get your books out!

reading interrupted.

“….how to read well: i.e. slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.”  Friedrich Nietzsche

“I take no sides. I am interested in the shape of ideas. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine ‘Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.’ That sentence has a wonderful shape. It’s the shape that matters.” Samuel Beckett

“Sentences are made wonderfully one at a time.” Gertrude Stein

Get one of your favorite novels.  Go on.  I’ll wait.

Now, flip to the last chapter.

And read the first sentence of that chapter.

Have you ever really paid much attention to that sentence? We don’t hold it in as much esteem as the first sentence of the book (the one that must, apparently, draw the reader in; what pressure). Or as the last sentence of the novel…

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