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Issue #8
August 3, 2024
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Middle lines are like middle children. They may be beautiful or brilliant, but (sigh) they will never be first or last.


I got to thinking about middle lines the other day after reading Maddie Dobrowski's insightful post on opening lines in her Love of Literature Substack. In this week's and next week's posts, we will lavish some love on a few middle lines from prose works.  These are not necessarily my list of favorite lines, but all are worthy of attention.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

This sentence sounds like an opening line, and indeed it would have worked well as the opening to Walden, but it actually appears well into the second section of the book, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For."  It's one of the most famous sentences that Thoreau wrote, and no wonder.  For one thing, it's a model of clarity and beauty.  Technically, it is a complex sentence (because it consists of an independent clause and at least one dependent clause), yet it's easy to follow.  Part of its clarity comes from Thoreau's placement of his grammatical subject ("I") and predicating verb ("went") at the beginning.  (We English speakers typically have an easier time understanding a sentence when we can identify the subject and predicating verb early.  Some writers go wrong by delaying one or both too long.)  Its aesthetic appeal, meanwhile, is largely due to the balance of its infinitive phrases, which come one after another like waves of the ocean: "to live deliberately," "to front only the essential facts of life, " "[to] see if I could not learn what it had to teach," and "[to] discover that I had not lived."  Like Melville, Twain, and a few other master prose stylists, Thoreau could craft sentences so magical that I almost don't care what they say.  Usually, I do care, though, because Thoreau expressed some fascinating and inspiring insights into life and the world.  Here, he anticipates the mindfulness movement of our own century when he wrote that he "wished to live deliberately."  The conclusion of the sentence presents a paradox that succinctly captures this notion of intentional living, a major theme of the book.  Thoreau says he did not wish to discover, at the time of death, that he "had not lived."  Of course, death is an end of life, so something that dies, by definition, must have lived, but Thoreau is implicitly arguing that living, truly living, involves intentionality.

"The magic of the real presence of distress,—the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,—these he had never tried."

-- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

In one of the best scenes of her famous novel, Stowe presents an exchange between Senator John Bird and his wife, Mary.  The senator supports a law "forbidding people to give meat and drink" to men and women escaping slavery.  Mary does not and says as much.  Before they can resolve their argument, however, the subject hits home, so to speak, because a young mother, who has crossed the Ohio River into the free state of Ohio, is now in their kitchen.  Soon, after seeing this formerly enslaved woman in the flesh, Senator Bird, who only moments earlier had been speaking of "great public interests" and "duty," is now showing, in the words of the chapter title, that he is "but a man."  He tells his wife, who needs no convincing, that the woman "needs clothes."  The scene effectively dramatizes what Stowe herself sought to do with her novel--that is, to present "pictures" of slavery and evoke sympathy--a pervasive term from nineteenth-century American literature--from readers so that they would oppose slavery along with her.  Senator Bird, who has been immersed in his newspaper in this scene, has just been telling his wife that he can make a "very clear argument," but, as Stowe writes, "his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word,--or, at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle, with ‘Ran away from the subscriber’ under it."  It takes the "magic of the real presence of distress" to evoke an emotional response and help to win him over to his wife's position.

"True, true."

-- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado"

Poe is known for horror, not humor.  In "The Cask of Amontillado," however, he put the two together in brilliant fashion.  The story, as you may recall, is a first-person account, by a man named Montressor, of luring an enemy, named Fortunato, into the catacombs and then burying him alive.  That summary does not scream hilarity.  (It just screams.)  Still, Poe sprinkles some comic moments throughout the story.  My favorite is the one that ends in these words as a punchline.  Once Fortunato gets into the catacombs, he begins to cough, and Montressor suggests that they leave.  This little piece of dramatic irony--we know he wants to stay, but poor Fortunato does not--itself makes for some humor, but the demonically delightful setup for Poe's best joke is Fortunato's line in which he emphatically rejects Montressor's suggestion that they go back:


“Enough,” he said; “the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough.”


To these lines, Montressor replies, "True--true."  Again, dramatic irony is the key to the humor: we know what Montressor is up to--namely murder--so, no, Fortunato, you poor fool, it is indeed true that you will not "die of a cough."

"When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples."

-- Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat"

I paraphrased this line in a conversation with a colleague not long ago, and he burst out laughing.  I wasn't expecting that reaction, but It's not entirely surprising.  For me, the line is a brilliantly expressed commentary on the human condition, especially during the crisis of faith in the late nineteenth century.  It comes in the midst of the narrator's account of four men in a boat in danger of drowning before they can reach the shore.  Here, in the notion of throwing bricks at a temple, is an expression of the anger that one might feel in a distressing, seemingly unfair situation.  All of us have felt anger, and we almost certainly can recall the natural inclination to want to blame someone for whatever is vexing us.  When there is no such person we might be tempted to curse God (as Satan tempts Job to do in the Old Testament), but Crane's line presents a situation that may be even worse.  For the faithless, there is nowhere to aim one's anger, leaving the enraged person feeling even more powerless, empty, and lost.  At the same time, as perhaps my colleague recognized, the irony of having no target for one's rage can be see as darkly comical.  That's Stephen Crane, the wry newspaper-reporter-turned-author, who has seen horrible things and sometimes stands detached from them, responding with a witty line and, we can imagine, a dry smile.


If you enjoyed this column, take heart.  It's not the end of middles.  I will return next week with some wonderful middle lines from Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and others.

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New podcast episode about Thomas Wolfe with Mark and other scholars

He was one of America’s greatest (and quirkiest) writers.  Learn more about novelist Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel and other books, with scholars Joe Bentz, Mark Canada, and Paula Eckard in this interview with Nate King of the American Writers Museum.

More from Mark

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In an age of smart phones and Apple watches, how important is human memory?​

 

An unimaginable number of facts, explanations, theories, opinions, images, and more are available on the Internet, and the rest of human recorded knowledge is available somewhere else: a library, an archive, a museum.  When all that information is available to the seeker, often literally at the touch of a finger, do we really need to commit much to memory?

About Mark

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A longtime English professor, scholar, and author, Mark Canada, Ph.D., writes and lectures on a variety of authors and subjects in the fields of literature, language, history, and leadership.

More from Mark

My scheduler and I are booking lectures for the summer and fall. Please send an email to mark.canada@icloud.com to pitch some possible dates for your group.  Here are a few topics I can cover:

  • "The Literature of the Sea"

  • "The Literary Mediterranean"

  • "Puzzling Poe"

  • "Frederick Douglass: Author, Abolitionist, Activist"

  • "Franklin in France: Diplomat, Celebrity, and Flirt"

  • "Benjamin Franklin: Scientist, Diplomat, Author--and Role Model?"

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To book Mark for a speaking engagement, click on the "Contact Mark" link below and send a message with dates and requested topics.

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