Splendid Sentences, Part 14: Lewis Thomas on Social Animals

Physician and writer Lewis Thomas won numerous literary awards in his lifetime for his insights connecting humanity to the scientific world, most likely for sentences like this 37-word one, which appears in his essay "Social Talk":

Social animals tend to keep at a particular thing, generally something huge for their size; they work at it ceaselessly under genetic instructions and genetic composition, using it to house the species and protect it, assuring permanence. 

Note four interesting decisions Thomas makes in this sentence:

1. The use of a semicolon. A period would do here, but Thomas wants to urge readers on as he extends his point about instinctual perseverance. 
2. The repetition of genetic. Since the social animal is his theme, he wants to emphasize that we have little choice in our disposition toward building, shaping, reinforcing, discarding, and rebuilding. 
3. The reverse order of instructions and composition.  Chronologically speaking, we would think that we are composed before we are instructed, but this point has little value to Thomas, who chooses a hierarchical arrangement of those ideas. Indeed, he is thinking of instructions not as the receipt of a list of commands but as a set of reflexive behaviors.
4. The suspension to the last two words of the critical point. By the time we get to the first comma, we have the complete thought, a sentence unto itself. Then Thomas holds out on us for 26 words the arguably two most important qualifying words in the sentence, assuring permanence. In doing so, he creates two reading pleasures: rhetorical positioning, by explaining what he means by keeping at a particular thing, and dramatic suspense by concluding the means with the end. 

You can read "Social Talk" and many other exceptional essays by Thomas in his 1974 book, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher.