josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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Passing under a railroad bridge, my bus was suddenly deluged by the accumulated runoff, massive even compared to tonight's hard rain. We passengers were collectively shocked, even maybe stupefied.
On Döblin and speed: part of Döblin's style is so inconspicuous that it took me hundreds of pages to realize the effects it was working: much of the prose posed relative to the characters' thoughts and feelings is relatively undifferentiated from that of other characters (whose consciousnesses may also be expressed by nearby sentences, though usually not too nearby), and indexical words and phrases are made to do more work in determining the meanings of the sentences than in 'more standard' novelistic prose. At times I can even catch myself making the imaginative effort, to keep in mind when I read a sentence who the pronouns refer to, what those characters have just done, what their longer-term relationships have been.