If punctuation is the invisible force that drives sentences, then sentences are the invisible force that drive ideas. All too often, the writer gets caught up in the forest of pages — the bigger picture. Lest she forget the equal parts beauty and importance of the lines of trees. This allows for growing mindfulness of intentionality and essentialism. Variation is key. There is an inevitable rhythm when it comes to language and the writer ought to be cognizant of it, delicate with dictating the flow, pattern, and tempo. This is in sharp contrast with one simple sentence after another — the usual perusal of cookie-cutter subject per predicate.

In his essay “100 Beautiful Sentences in Literature”, former USC professor John Fox asserts that there are criteria to regard when meditating on the intrinsic value of a sentence. It must “achieve beauty by the complexity of [its] construction, the way the sentence unspools” while simultaneously “attempt new forms, rebel against syntax and grammar rules, and innovate with language … functioning as an aphorism.”

A refuge where one can often find powerful, unspooling sentences is within the birth of free verse poetry by Walt Whitman. The Good Grey Poet preferred to show the natural pacing and cadence of language as one would when speaking. By extension of this practice, his work also used extended lines, which bled over the margins and kept going into the next line. This practice was also used with enumerations, where lines would begin with the same wording or phrasing, and act as a listing or catalog. The technical word for this is anaphora (or epanaphora) and “refers to the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of lines” (Kummings et al.), which is often used in biblical texts and religious sermons (Bauer). An excellent example of this is the following can be found in a preface to Leaves of Grass:

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

It is effortless to examine both the complexity and complete disregard for regular mechanics in the sentence above — there is unbridled innovation and wisdom that conjures up the spirit of doing within a person. Yale English professor Jim Berger writes that, in Whitman’s work, the “[l]ong lines are oceanic. They wash over you like waves, one after another, each of them full of shells and sand and fish and surfboards, sometimes pieces of wrecks and the bodies of sailors. The long line is more conclusive and inclusive than the partial, subdivided short line.”

In sharp contrast to this, another sentence that has haunted me for the past ten years goes as follows:

“And in my dreams, you’re alive and you’re crying.”

This lyric comes from the song “Two Headed Boy pt. 2” off the cult classic independent album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. Jeff Mangum, as a lyricist, has a comprehension of imagery that goes beyond understanding into the realms of mysticism. One must ask what is being implied with this sentence, for its emotional weight is carried in what’s not explicitly being stated: Only in my dreams — my fantasies — you’re alive. You have passed, and you are still so often in my thoughts that I dream about you. Alas, even there, even in a place of unbridled possibilities, you are only crying.

Although there is masterful technical work in unspooling an incredibly long and intricate sentence that can derive its beauty and meaning from, it takes an artistic halo to do the same so succinctly. As if words were the strokes on a game of golf. It was Blaise Pascal who first infamously proclaimed: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” Without the limitation of space, it is far easier to get whatever point across that you may have.

There are many lines peppered and scattered throughout this album that are just as poignant and endearing, but this one perhaps has the most emotional density. The lines before and after, contrary to common sense, do not make more sense of this, rather with his surrealist gift of gab, Mangum only raises more questions and expands the field of imagination for the listener:

“In a struggle to find secret songs that you keep wrapped in boxes so tight / sounding only at night when you sleep.”

This is then followed by:

“As your mouth moves in my, soft and sweet. Rings of flowers around your eyes and I love you for the rest of your life.”

If you’re asking who exactly Mangum dreams about still being alive, it should be noted that in earlier bootleg versions of the song the line following is originally “nineteen forty and five”, referencing the year that Anne Frank died of a typhus epidemic within the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Quoting Mangum in an article for Classic Album Sundays, Colleen Murphy writes: “As he told a Puncture magazine interviewer before Aeroplane‘s release, “I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I’d have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank. Do you think that’s embarrassing?”