Human Moments
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It satisfies every childlike curiosity, every muted desire, whatever there is in him of the scientist, the poet, the
primitive seer, the watcher of fire and shooting stars, whatever obsessions eat at the night side of his mind,
whatever sweet and dreamy yearning he has ever felt for nameless places faraway, whatever earth-sense he
possesses, the neural pulse of some wilder awareness, a sympathy for beasts, whatever belief in an immanent vital
force, the Lord of Creation, whatever secret harboring of the idea of human oneness, whatever wishfulness and
simplehearted hope, whatever of too much and not enough, all at once and little by little, whatever burning urge to
escape responsibility and routine, escape his own overspecialization, the circumscribed and inward-spiraling self,
whatever remnants of his boyish longing to fly, his dreams of strange spaces and eerie heights, his fantasies of
happy death, whatever indolent and sybaritic leanings, lotus-eater, smoker of grasses and herbs, blue-eyed gazer
into space — all these are satisfied, all collected and massed in that living body, the sight he sees from the window.
-Don DeLillo, Human Moments in World War III
I’ve gravitated to this sentence again and again since coming across it in an issue of Esquire magazine I was
flipping through while getting my hair cut some years ago. It’s from a short story by Don DeLillo- “Human
Moments in World War III”- and for the longest time I searched the Internet and bookstores for a book, any
book, containing the story in its entirety. I had always thought that the sentence referred to a person- that the
sight the unnamed “he” sees from the window was someone dearly loved, so much so that the sight of that
person was the tonic for the ennui, doubt, cynicism, shelved dreams and quiet cruelty of living and growing
up.
Well, I did finally get to read all of the story a couple years after first coming across the sentence when I found
a used (and absolutely fantastic) anthology of Esquire-published fiction while on an unplanned excursion to a
bookshop in the Mall of Asia. Turns out that the sight seen from the window referred to in the sentence above
was actually the Earth itself, and that the “he” who was taking it all in was actually Vollmer, an astronaut in
orbit.
Even if I was initially disappointed that my rather mawkish reading of the sentence didn’t turn out to be in
line with the intention of the author, the above remains an incredible sentence- maybe my favorite written
sentence of the few hundred thousand I’ve encountered in my lifetime. It’s a breathtaking exercise in pulse,
rhythm and feeling, exquisitely constructed and full of grand sentiment without being drippy, and something I
always think about when sitting down to write.
Sentences after all are evocative devices and, when used well, extend beyond the purview of plain, narrative
meaning. Peter Mendelsund says that a good book “contends with a calculus greater than the mere facts of its
narrative”, emphasizing the liter-ary over the liter-al (via Frank Chimero’s excellent blog). Sentences, as the
basic component parts of books, ought to have the same literary aspirations; the prose writers I admire most
write as if working in verse, and have an enviable knack for injecting a breathing sensuality into sentences
such that, instead of being straight moving vessels taking the dramatic narrative of a story from point A to
point B, they become objects of enjoyment in themselves, startling in structure perhaps, laden with
provocation, innuendo and gripping emotion, invocations of human moments.
And they needn’t be over-embellished to attain this kind of depth either; even the most modest, miserly
sentence can be as evocative as any other. Consider this sentence by David Foster Wallace, from the short
story “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”: Very little time wasted about dawn in Illinois- the sun
seems to get all of a sudden just sneezed up into the faded sky. Or this one, from Cormac McCarthy’s “The
Road”: Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. Lordy.
Anyway, there’s no real point to this entry, except to remind myself that, like any other art, good writing is
hard to do and takes skill/talent and years of devotion to attain. And that while the bar for good writing rests
on an incredibly high tier, for those of us who do practice writing, a single sentence can be immensely
enjoyable, instructive and inspiring.