The Year In Great Sentences
Phillip Pantuso, Editorial Fellow, Brooklyn Magazine
Sentence: “Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity—whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body.”
Who Wrote It: Ben Lerner, 10:04
Why It’s Great: This line contains the concentrated essence of Lerner’s prose style: the high-Latinate diction, clausal repetitions, and conceptual metaphors that read, when Lerner’s in full flight, like an ekphrasis of anxiety. It is also a thesis, of sorts, for the novel. In 10:04, Lerner’s narrator works his way from irony to sincerity with regard to his belief in a better future for humanity. Widescale tragedy, or the threat of it, is the last bastion of communal fellowship—e.g. New Yorkers were never closer than after 9/11, or after Hurricane Sandy. But what if creating a better world—and staving off the next disaster in the process—could foster the same social camaraderie? 10:04 strives to remind us that the communal body exists, and is worth salvaging.