First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing . . . and Life

by Joe Moran

It bears the social obligation to make something for the joy of making it, quietly and beautifully. It invests the simplest daily acts with artistry, whether it be making tea, raking Shirakawa gravel in a garden or curating that work of art and lunch that is a bento box. The point of life is to infuse the quotidian with the pleasure of creation and the pursuit of perfection.

The best kinds of teaching pass on some usable splinter of knowledge, some stored-up wisdom of the tribe. A guitar chord, a sushi recipe, a bit of computer coding: it almost doesn’t matter what. What matters is that you give it away, pass it on, pay it forward.

The purest form of love is just caring—paying someone else the compliment of your curiosity and holding them in your head, if only for a moment. The purest form of praise is to pay attention. This is how we offer up the simplest of blessings to the world around us and to the lives of others. “Attention,” wrote the French thinker Simone Weil, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Give your sentences that courtesy and they will repay you.

“A sentence,” he writes, “is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in.”

There is no virtue in volume, no benefit in bulk. The world has plenty of sentences already, so pause before you add to the pile. Most of us, when we write, march too quickly on to the next sentence. To write intelligibly is hard enough, so be sure you have done that first. Fix your sights on making one sane, sound, serviceable sentence. As a farmer must do, hold your nerve and resist the impulse to put your energies into cash crops with quick returns. Have the confidence to leave fields fallow, to wait patiently for the grain to grow and to bear with the dry seasons.

“I am,” wrote John Clare, “yet what I am none cares or knows.”

“changing your mind is an occupational hazard of thought.”

the right word is only the right word in the right place.

Writing a sentence well involves caring, taking pains for the benefit of others. But it is a special kind of caring: not the empathetic concern we have for people we love, but care for the anonymous humanity that may, at some future point, encounter the evidence of our presence in the world.