Now that's a sentence!

I've got this unfortunate habit of writing really long sentences, and really long paragraphs. Hemingway I am not. People stop emailing me because when they send me a three line email I send them three quarters of a page. It just floods out.

I've been thinking that this is due to the literature I cut my teeth on, the first serious books I read as a teenager. My high school girlfriend's father was an anthropology professor, and so she was surrounded with serious books and serious ideas. I was a smart kid, but not exactly surrounded with serious books. So the summer after we started going out, between 11th and 12th grades, I let Denise pick my reading list. And I swear, it was one Doestoyevsky book after another. The Idiot. Crime and Punishment. The motherfucking Brothers Karamatzov. I'm not sure, but I think I read these back to back. And that was that, and my friends today must suffer my 100-word sentences, though I really do try to at least cut the sentences down.

This memory of reading Doestoyevsky was triggered by a book I'm reading, which I read for about eight hours on the plane down here. It's fantastic, really the highest of literary art, but the first part at least is definitely written in the style of those wordy 19th century russians.

So, without further ado, from "The Sleepwalkers" by Hermann Broch, here is quite the sentence:

"Driven by that extraordinary oppression which falls on every human being when, childhood over, he begins to divine tht he is fated to go on in isolation and unaided towards his own death; driven by this extraordinary oppression, which may with justice be called a fear of God, man looks round him for a companion hand in hand with whom he may tread the road to the dark portal, and if he has learned by experience how pleasurable it undoubtedly is to lie with another fellow-creature in bed, then he is ready to believe that this extremely intimate association of two bodies may last until these bodies are coffined: and even if at the same time it has its disgusting aspects, because it takes place under coarse and badly aired sheets, or because he is convinced that all a girl cares for is to get a husband who will support her in later life, yet it must not be forgotten that every fellow-creature, even if she has a sallow complexion, sharp, thin features and an obviously missing tooth in her left upper jaw, yearns, in spite of her missing tooth, for that love which she thinks will for ever shield her from death, from that fear of death which sinks with the falling of every night upon the human being who sleeps alone, a fear that already licks her as with a tongue of flame when she begins to take off her clothes, as Fraulein Erna was doing now; she laid aside her faded red-velvet blouse and took off her dark-green skirt and her petticoat."