Surprising Sentences, Part 4: Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Nonviolence Imperative

At the conclusion of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1967 collection of lectures, The Trumpet of Conscience, appears this surprising 75-word sentence:

In a world facing the revolt of ragged and hungry masses of God's children; in a world torn between the tensions of East and West, white and colored, individualists and collectivists; in a world whose cultural and spiritual power lags so far behind her technological capabilities that we live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation; in this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis, it is an imperative for action.

King's pacifist philosophy of nonviolence does not come as a jolt; in fact, it is the hallmark of all this masterful communicator's messages. His syntax, however, is another story on at least four counts. First, his juxtaposing of the immanent terms cultural and spiritual with technological capabilities comes unexpectedly, forcing us to search our priorities in a way we might not have previously. Then comes the relative clause that we live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation, following the two unqualified prepositional phrases in a world facing the revolt and in a world torn. Next King switches from the thrice-used, parallel in a world to the more immediate and intensive in this world. Finally, he concludes with a comma splice after intellectual analysis, knowing a semicolon or period would be more grammatically proper and a dash more dramatic. Instead he chooses to end abruptly with the comma to add to the urgency of his assertion. Such is the stuff of powerful rhetoric.

Surprising Sentences, Part 3: Natalia Ginzburg on Enduring and Conflicting Companionships

Italian author Natalia Ginzburg's remarkable essay "He and I" begins with the comma splice "He always feels hot, I always feel cold." We immediately know we are in for a study of contrasts, as in "Youth and Old Age," Aristotle's comparison between young and old men. But she gives us so much more in an impartial, intimate look at an enduring relationship in spite of a legion of personal differences. She ends the essay with this 117-word sentence:

If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and I sometimes to ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago one the Via Nazionale, two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little bit about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever as the sun set at the corner of the street.

Such a stunning sentence takes us along with this young couple on their walk two decades earlier than where they are now, observing the unpredictability of human attachments, of two people not walking away forever but bonding forever.

Surprising Sentences, Part 2: Vaclav Havel on Surviving Totalitarianism

On New Year's Day 1990, playwright Vaclav Havel said these words as the newly elected President of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic):

We live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. 

How remarkable that the leader of a country would place the blame for his people's suffering in a totalitarian state squarely on their own shoulders! So much is happening in that second sentence. After setting it up with a first sentence that likens immorality with toxicity, Havel uses fell to imply an accident and morally ill to suggest a sickness, much like we consider a personality disorder or substance abuse an illness. Then he shifts to thought, learning, belief, and care, which are innate human capacities that each of us is responsible for cultivating.

Notice how Havel refrains from ending that second sentence with what we thought was true, not to spare his audience from listening to those final two words but to place an even greater burden on them. They were, he insisted, responsible for everything they thought. They did not speak their minds against a brutal, self-serving, authoritarian regime. They created a reality that contradicted what they knew was morally just. Powerful writing.

Surprising Sentences, Part 1: Umberto Ecco on Being

Between November 27, 2018 and July 26, 2019, WORDS ON THE LINE presented Splendid Sentences, a 25-part series showing the power of syntax in styling beautiful prose that captures the reader's imagination. Driven by the popularity of those posts, I now begin a new 25-part series, Surprising Sentences, focusing less on finesse and more on impact, sentences that cause the reader to pause through irony, ambiguity, contradiction, repetition, or other methods, including breaking of a grammatical rule.

The first case in point is from Umberto Ecco's "On Being" in his book Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, translated by Alastair McEwen (page 17):

Why is there being rather than nothing? Because there is.

This sentence, italicized by the author, is as definitive an answer to the question he poses as it is funny. It follows nine pages of ruminating about semiotics and existence as an answer to German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz's famously posed question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Then suddenly appears this three-word answer to an apparently unanswerable question that has plagued thinkers for millennia. How could Ecco not be right if you are reading his words? 

His clipped answer, beginning the sentence with because, breaks grammatical convention to create a humorously haughty so-there or because-I-said-so effect.

Ecco's thinking here is deep as well. It is not a shallow retelling of Cogito, ergo sum ("I think; there I am") from Descartes's Meditation on First Philosophy. Rather, Ecco positions being as something and for the purposes of his argument on language and resolves it 37 pages later by writing:

What the Poets are really saying to us is that we need to encounter being, that we need to confront being with gaiety (and hopefully with science too), to question it, test its resistances, grasp its openings and its hints, which are never too explicit.

The rest is conjecture.

That final sentence is surprising in its irony and truth too.