Aug
25

Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving goodbye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

 

About

Poets think in lines, prose writers in sentences; the best of both work from sound to sense, with an ear for the music in their compositions. S for Sentence celebrates lyricism in prose, the play and craft at work in the artful sentence. We post a sentence a month along with comments by a guest writer on the craft that shapes it, on what makes it great. In one or two sentences.
—Pearl Abraham, Editor
Two favorite sentiments, nostalgia and hope, twine and pulse through this sentence: Nostalgia for the clean white sheets blowing in the wind, and of course for the iridescent "beetles and dahlias" playing in the light; hope for the goodness and uplift of transcendent light. We are in the death scene of Remedios, beauty personified, and Marquez follows the "flapping sheets" with the double beat of "with her," repeating it, like a heartbeat, grounding us, so that we can bear this loss, the end of "four o'clock in the afternoon," of time, and of memory.
—Jennifer Rose, author of “14 Cockroaches”