Nov
26

You can’t carry on like this, it is not right, you will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much,” and as he said that, dragging me through the lobby of that theatre, into the cold light, I woke up into the bleak winter morning on my twenty-first birthday, the window-sill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.
—Delmore Schwartz, from “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”

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
This virtuosic ending in which Schwartz imagines being in a theater, watching the movie of his parents' courtship and hoping to intervene and fend off its sad outcome, gives the reader pause midway, just as the story does: the narrator is ejected by a fellow filmgoer into the light of day and we, too, at that light, take a breath. After which, nature continues. The snow shines. Everything is late, laden with guilt, the morning begun.
—Edie Meidav is the author of Kingdom of the Young and Lola, California