“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”*…
What is a sentence? But that is such a formal question. How about, what is a sentence for? Less formal, perhaps, but obviously impossible to answer, for sheer variety. There may be some human purposes that don’t find their way into sentences, but writers keep trying, and for any limit we experience there may be a sentence in waiting and a writer to try it…
I’ll propose one purpose that all sentences have in common. The purpose of a sentence is to end. If this is a property of all sentences, any ought to do for an example, but here is one particularly determined to be done with itself:
1 The world is everything that is the case.
It comes from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as translated from German into English by C. K. Ogden in 1922…
From the first of the Paris Review’s eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic, scholar, and poet Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence every week. Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses.
[TotH to John Stedman]
* H.L. Mencken
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As we pause to parse prose, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that the celebration of the crafter of so very many elegant sentences, Martin Luther King, was made official, when President Ronald Reagan signed the bill creating the Martin Luther King Jr. Day federal holiday. Reagan had opposed the holiday, citing its cost, joining southern Republicans like Jesse Helms, who were more naked in their reasoning; but the enabling legislation had passed by a veto-proof margin.
