September 22, 2004
William Gass
I'm in Philadelphia today to see the autumn exhibitions at the ICA and the Fabric Workshop. Therefore all I have to offer is a pair of quotes and a link. Fortunately, both quotes are from William Gass's "The Music of Prose," collected in Finding a Form, and the link is to an essay published in the January 2004 Harper's. First, from the earlier publication:
Yet no prose can pretend to greatness if its music is not also great; if it does not, indeed, construct a surround of sound to house its meaning the way flesh was once felt to embody the soul, at least till the dismal day of the soul's eviction and the flesh's decay.
and later:
...language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of the sentence, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination too; it is the allocation of the things of the world to their place in the world of the word
To enjoy prose that "embodies the soul" of meaning, I highly recommend you read "On Evil: The Ragged Core of a Sweet Apple," a review of Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Were I editor of the Best American Essays 2004 volume to be published sometime next year, this piece would surely make the list. For me, reading Gass—like reading Joseph Brodsky, Mary McCarthy, James Wood, or Italo Calvino, an admittedly diverse and improvised list—is simultaneously deep pleasure and learning experience.