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.
