The square root of a sentence

or, how I have no real idea what that means

I wrote the above title whilst nursing a Negroni, swirling the carmine liquid around a slab of ice, contemplating the stars as I witnessed the grandeur of a crescent moon. Alright, fine, that's a total lie. I was inhaling the cocktail, gorging on its luscious aroma as fast as I could, thinking of nothing else save the terrifying gulf of an unwritten page.

The Negroni has, I feel, replaced the Old Fashioned—that yardstick of a bartender’s worth—as my preferred and swiftest means to introduce alcohol into my system. There's something special about the Campari structure, the chinotto and cascarilla, the dance of botanicals and robust contribution of gin. It is a divine and heady drink, one that flips a number of internal switches, shifting them away from science and towards that which I so desire¹. Many would, I’m sure, spurn any reliance upon alcohol to drive such creative lust. And though I do (urggh) begrudgingly agree, I am all in favour of the fact it helps bring forth such idiocy as “the square root of a sentence.”

So, let’s not mess about here: this post will be at least 50% not-at-all-serious.

---

It took me until I was well into my thirties to be aware of why I adore literature. Whilst stories have always been central to my love of fiction, film and games, it is through reading that I have largely found who I am. The shell of my body would have forever encased something hollow had I not been able to fill it with the beautiful unreality that permeates so much of the written page. My life, whatever it is that defines such, has been shaped by what I have read. Books are, I am quite certain, a lifeblood.

There's something else I have become aware of. When I'm reading I like to taste the flavour of a sentence. It must have a certain quality—a piquant arrangement of words, to put it more delicately—for it to pass the tongue and be found acceptable within the damp grey matter of my mind. I hunt for these sentences, I seek them out, desiring the pleasure of the ink. Of course, not all sentences manage this, and nor should they have to. A book's text need not strive to impart such feelings; the words are, after all, the conduit to emerge into whatever world the author has uncovered beneath. These words can be transparent, sliding past without being seen. There are plenty of authors I enjoy where I forget I am even reading at all. But—but!—as I age, and my longing, much like my desire of a Negroni’s aromatic allure, seeks the inhalation of words at an ever increasing pace, I am drawn to literature rich at the level of both story and sentence. Yet what is it that defines such? What makes a certain string of words register a feeling in the brain—something thought on long after a book has been closed—whilst some other and far inferior composition has all the flavour of limp cabbage and slides unknown into the digestive tract, to be expelled along with so many others?

I have absolutely no idea, of course. As ever, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Grammatical rules and structure … these are things I have no way of navigating other than by feel. (What even is a preposition, anyway?) Perhaps I should learn. Perhaps I should finally finish leafing through The Elements of Style and ask myself of the many errors in my prose. Whatever. What I’m trying to say is that in recent weeks I’ve found myself returning to this concept of feeling. I have spoken previously, I think², of Haruki Murakami and the subtle sense of the surreal his words can impart. In writing this post, I went searching through several of his books to find a sentence that could convey this thing that I’m so poorly trying to describe. I found it almost impossible. These feelings are those that arise only when within the flow and totality of his novels. Within the well, if you will. To try and extract and analyse such in isolation is to risk destroying any magic that each imparts. I do not understand the formula that is at play. I am no mathematician of words. The closest I can come is that some component, some essence of a sentence, is the very core. (To play to the title: it is the very root.) These two facets are intertwined: to remove the core removes the whole; yet the core cannot exist without the whole.

I will refrain from a deluge of quotes (such things are personal, after all), but in a futile attempt to expound on this conjecture (and to risk the ruin of the magic), here is a short passage from Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase:

She’d become so beautiful, it defied understanding. Never had I feasted my eyes on such beauty. It transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness. She was at one with her ears, gliding down the oblique face of time like a protean beam of light.

"You are extraordinary." I said after catching my breath.

"I know." she said. "These are my ears in their unblocked state."

These are my ears in their unblocked state. Remove that precise and strange wording and the passage will collapse. It will fold in on itself, to never have existed at all. Conversely, in isolation those words emit only a glimmer of something—they allude to the whole, but that whole is a thing that can only be crafted when the author (and here Murakami is a master) is capable of understanding how.

Murakami is not the only author to exert this effect. Nabokov, a writer in whose work I have only briefly dabbled, elicited this state throughout my read of Lolita. I finished that novel and walked away enraptured by the prose, letting it spill and soak into my blood, some strings of words—The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future—remaining unfiltered even now. Soon I will turn my gaze to his other works and bask in the pale fire of his brilliance.

There are others, of course³. Borges, an author of labyrinthine depth I had no knowledge of until recently, breathes mystery into so much of what he writes. The below passage is from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. These words are, simultaneously, the root and the whole, intertwined in a complex dance:

Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody.

I cannot help but feel I am affected by such. As I write, and continue to try to write, whatever I am reading percolates, inflating the twin chambers of my lungs, some various molecules of an author’s style absorbed by my alveoli and dispersed throughout my being. I do not wish to ape, but as I journey forward perhaps that is inevitable and even necessary. Perhaps that is what one is meant to do. It is impossible not to be influenced in some way, amalgamating and amassing, selecting and discarding, being affected and affecting.

Nothing could make me more excited.

Photo by Finn Mund on Unsplash

1. In case it is not obvious by now: to write; to scribble nonsense; to explore the relationships of the entirely fictitious.

2. Let’s not pretend that I’d actually go and check.

3. I would be remiss to not mention Mircea Cărtărescu, whose name I still cannot spell. His mind-bending Solenoid changed my life. (OK, minimal hyperlinks because I try to keep everything within a post, but it is important to also mention

Dr. Kathleen Waller

‘s discussion on this too, found here.)