kung fu grippe

Oh, sure. We kid Dan Brown. How can you not?

But, when I was in NYC the other night, I was talking to some folks about the crazy sentences we do love. And reading a tumbling from steampoweredmedia reminded me of one of mine. Not my favorite sentence ever. Not near the best opening line of a book ever.

But I clearly remember reading that first line of Absalom, Absalom! in 1988 and thinking, “Holy shit, I need to sit the fuck down, turn off The Smiths, and just read this book.” Because it said:

From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that — a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

Go, Bill. Work it. Fucking A, right, that’s a hundred and twenty-three words.

And, maybe not coincidentally? The book ends with what may, yes, be one of my favorite last lines. Certainly one of the most memorable:

“Tell about the South,” said Shreve McCannon. “What do they do there? How do they live there? Why do they?…Tell me one more thing. Why do you hate the South?”

“I don’t hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I don’t hate it,” he said. “I don’t hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”

Jesus, I miss paragraphs.