A BEAUTIFUL PARAGRAPH? YES, A BEAUTIFUL PARAGRAPH.

Like Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows," great writing can move me to tears.

     There are several kinds of tears, of course: tears of grief, tears of pain, tears of happiness. My favorite tears are “tears of beauty”—the tears that come when something beautiful squeezes your soul so hard that it overflows through your eyes. Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor (Dinu Lipatti version) does it for me. Van Gogh’s painting “Wheatfield with Crows” does it, too, and so does the movie Babette’s Feast.

     Like most serious writers and readers, I can in five minutes name fifty pieces of writing—poems, novels, short stories, even essays—that cause me to weep for their beauty. To name a quick few: Yeats’s poem “A Prayer for My Daughter,” Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited,” George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant.”

     Even a single paragraph can evoke my tears, and this post is about one of those.

     E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” is the most satisfying essay I’ve ever read. It describes White’s visit to the lake where his family vacationed when he was a boy. Now a father himself, White returns to the lake with his own son, where he discovers that, in a way, nothing has changed since he was there as a boy with his own father, a lifetime before. As the essay proceeds, time melts away. Then, in the end, White realizes that some things must change. The essay, which deals with profound and moving subjects (death, memory, identity, the cycles of life), offers beautiful paragraph after beautiful paragraph. The final two paragraphs will sear themselves forever into your memory. The following paragraph, in which White describes taking his son fishing, early in the essay, is one that moves me to tears, not so much for its sentiment as for the beauty of its writing:

We went fishing the first morning. I felt the same damp moss covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years. The small waves were the same, chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the boat was the same boat, the same color green and the ribs broken in the same places, and under the floor-boards the same fresh-water leavings and debris—the dead helgramite, the wisps of moss, the rusty discarded fishhook, the dried blood from yesterday’s catch. We stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the dragonflies that came and went. I lowered the tip of mine into the water, tentatively, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet away, poised, darted two feet back, and came to rest again a little farther up the rod. There had been no years between the ducking of this dragonfly and the other one—the one that was part of memory. I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn’t know which rod I was at the end of.

     I should end this post now and let you run off to read the whole essay, which you can find here.

A single specific dragonfly on the tip of a fishing pole.

     But because this blog is about writing well, I feel obliged to discuss, just briefly, what makes this writing so good. Here are some of the things you might notice:

1) The paragraph teems with perfectly observed concrete images: moss, the bait can, the dragonflies, the green rowboat with its broken ribs, the moss, the rusty fishhook, the dried blood, the fishing rods. The only important abstraction is the magic word “memory.” Great writing rests on concrete images—things to see, taste, touch, smell, and hear.

2) The paragraph is full of specifics. Generalities like “leavings and debris” are immediately followed by their specifics: the moss, the fishhook, and so on. The many dragonflies even resolve to one single, specific dragonfly. Great writing is full of specifics.

3) The language of the paragraph is plain, not fancy. (The only word you might not know is “helgramite”—spelled “hellgrammite” in my dictionary—which is a kind of larva used by fishermen as bait. I didn’t mind looking the word up; a fisherman probably needn’t. It is, in fact, a nice specific word.) 

"Hellgrammite" is used as bait. It's a wonderfully specific word, even if I didn't know what it meant.

Most of the words in the paragraph are crisp, and of seemingly Anglo-Saxon origin: “dragonfly,” “moss,” “worms,” “chucking,” “rowboat,” “blood,” “boy,” and so on. (Actually, “dragon” does have Latin roots, and “worm” may, but they don’t feel Latinate.) There are very few words of obviously Latin or Greek origin. Such words are often “softer” and stretchier and more languorous: “silently,” “tentatively,” and “pensively” are Latinate, and they quiet the writing, slow it down just when White wants to. Latinate words often call for the reader to pause a bit, and think more abstractly. “Memory” is one of those words here. Anglo-Saxon words are often more direct and act more instantaneously on the reader’s senses. The difference between Latinate words and Anglo-Saxon words is the difference between “memory” and “moss.” (More on the difference between Latin/Greek words and Anglo-Saxon words in a future post.) Great writing doesn’t require a souped-up vocabulary, and Anglo-Saxon words tend to reach a reader’s nerve-endings faster than Latin- or Greek-based words.

4) The sentences vary perfectly in length and rhythm, in keeping with the sentiment. The paragraph begins with a short, grammatically simple sentence, just as the event—going fishing with his son—seems, at first, a simple, uncomplicated act. The second sentence is longer, as the author begins to observe the ordinary details of the boat, and things, including his thinking, begin to slow down. The third sentence is longer still, very long, slow as the summer’s day, piling up ever more dreamy, nostalgic details, as White’s writing starts to reflect the slowing down and then the overlapping of time, and his deliberative examination of, and ruminations on, the scene. The next sentences, of modest length, replace the many dragonflies with the modest little story of the single dragonfly White dunks, as he finds himself losing himself in memory. The final sentence is again short and simple, so it doesn’t dilute the stunning impact of the writer’s “dizziness” and displaced identity. (The final sentence also is a good example of why you sometimes have to end a sentence with a preposition. How would you write that sentence otherwise?) In good writing, sentence length and sentence rhythm match the subject, as here.

5) The word choice, especially of verbs, is perfectly precise: “alight,” “hovering,” “chucking,” “darting,” “dislodged,” “poised,” “ducking.” I especially love “poised"—exactly right to describe a dragonfly stopped in midair.  Precise words snap good writing into focus, and (to mix my metaphors) strong verbs give it its pulse.

6) The few figures of speech are fresh, vivid, accurate, and unselfconscious. The first two are lovely and lucid: The years gone by were a “mirage.” The waves are “chucking the rowboat under the chin.” Finally, there’s the metaphor (if that’s what to call it) to which all of this has been leading: “It was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching.” He has become his own son. (Elsewhere in the essay, he realizes that he has also assumed the role of his own father.) Great figures of speech aren’t designed to show off the writer but to illuminate ideas. These do that beautifully.

Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" famously sums up the connection of truth to beauty.

7) The paragraph is absolutely sincere, absolutely honest. We trust this writer—because of his modesty, because of his powers of observation, because of the unpretentious language, because we don’t feel manipulated—rather, we feel enlightened, privileged to share his experience. There is truth being told here. Cue Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” (See here.)  Yup. Only writing that is true, by a writer whom we trust, can be really beautiful.

     I could talk about some of the other wonders in this paragraph: the pitch-perfect tone, the use of parallel structure, repetition of words (see how he uses "same"), syntactic variation—heck, the adverbs alone deserve special praise. But I’ll stop here. I don’t want to worry this wonderful piece of writing to tatters.

     If you are a writer or a serious reader, you have your own favorite pieces of writing, those that bring you to tears. It can be illuminating to analyze them carefully, to understand how they perform their magic. I promise such analysis will only enhance your love of them.

     The word “beautiful” should never be used carelessly. I use it carefully in this post. E.B. White’s  paragraph earns my tears.

E.B. White, a modest, magnificent writer