On Writing the Perfect Paragraph

A single perfect paragraph, this is what I long to create.  Imagine an hour (or three) spent at the keyboard crafting the exquisite first seven lines of a short story.  My verb tenses will all be right.  I want the various plurals to be proper.  In essence what I want is to create something which is without glaring error. When I am done, I will have left words and punctuation so precise the reader is completely drawn in and captured by the narrative. I want the words in that first paragraph to be so good that any reader would know what follows will just blow them away. 

But.  

 

But I will never write such a paragraph.  Why?  Because I was a fuck up in grade school and high school.  Sometimes I can mine a vein of memory or experience to open up a quite interesting premise, but the mechanics of my writing just drives readers away. Probably the only grammar that has stuck with me is what I learned in my 3 years of high school Latin.  I remember the nominative and the ablative, I remember the pluperfect. So what? If I had have paid more attention to my seventh and eight grade English instructors I would be a writing threat. Sadly,  the style and structure with which the ancient Romans captured their thoughts do not translate well to the modern rules of writing.

 

Note well I have read perfect paragraphs and pages of perfect paragraphs strung together.  Ken Kesey’s first page or two of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, just perfect.  The last paragraph of The Remains of the Dayis so unbelievable in perfection.  I think the latter is in many ways more perfect for it pulls together a hundred threads of thought and feeling that were loose throughout the narrative and ties them all up with a big bright bow of crisp carefully selected words.

 

Yeah, I want to write a perfect paragraph.

Here is what I believe is an example of several perfect paragraphs strung together.  These are the first three paragraphs of James Hiltion's Goodbye Mr. Chips.

When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape. It was like that for Chips as the autumn term progressed and the days shortened till it was actually dark enough to light the gas before call-over. For Chips, like some old sea captain, still measured time by the signals of the past; and well he might, for he lived at Mrs. Wickett's, just across the road from the School. He had been there more than a decade, ever since he finally gave up his mastership; and it was Brookfield far more than Greenwich time that both he and his landlady kept. "Mrs. Wickett," Chips would sing out, in that jerky, high-pitched voice that had still a good deal of sprightliness in it, "you might bring me a cup of tea before prep, will you?"

When you are getting on in years it is nice to sit by the fire and drink a cup of tea and listen to the school bell sounding dinner, call-over, prep, and lights-out. Chips always wound up the clock after that last bell; then he put the wire guard in front of the fire, turned out the gas, and carried a detective novel to bed. Rarely did he read more than a page of it before sleep came swiftly and peacefully, more like a mystic intensifying of perception than any changeful entrance into another world. For his days and nights were equally full of dreaming.

He was getting on in years (but not ill, of course); indeed, as Doctor Merivale said, there was really nothing the matter with him. "My dear fellow, you're fitter than I am," Merivale would say, sipping a glass of sherry when he called every fortnight or so. "You're past the age when people get these horrible diseases; you're one of the few lucky ones who're going to die a really natural death. That is, of course, if you die at all. You're such a remarkable old boy that one never knows." But when Chips had a cold or when east winds roared over the fenlands, Merivale would sometimes take Mrs. Wickett aside in the lobby and whisper: "Look after him, you know. His chest... it puts a strain on his heart. Nothing really wrong with him— only anno domini, but that's the most fatal complaint of all, in the end."