Nov
23

Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.
—Franz Kafka, “The Parable of the Leopards”

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
Kafka's sentence, which makes up the entire story, plays no role in the sequence of sentences surrounding it, the before and after that most sentences in a text require. This is a single, complex statement that forms its own context: weaving itself only into its own world, rather than into the fabric of the larger narrative that it is part of. The parable targets those of us in danger of not being aware, or of being insufficiently aware, of the helplessly human and limiting ways that we generate meaning.
—Chuck Wachtel, author of Joe the Engineer, 3/03, and Because We Are Here