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At this point it was obvious that the amount of research into film history and Nick Nolte's genealogy that I would have to do in order to justify the sentence made the sentence worse than useless to me, even if it didn't make me sound like a bigot. But the problem of how to make that point, how to construct that sentence, continued to occupy my walks to and from work long after I had decided that I wasn't even going to mention Stavans in my essay. It had detached itself from the world of purpose and meaning, and become a purely formal exercise in rhythm, balance, and the possibility of elegance. It was driving me nuts, but I couldn't let it go, and after a time I began to reflect that I was acting like a mathematician trying to solve something like Fermat's Last Theorem—except that for solving Fermat's Last Theorem Andrew Wiles won a lucrative prize and international renown, whereas for solving the Ilan Stavans/Nick Nolte Problem I would win nothing but a reputation for ethnic insensitivity.
Alas, it's not just my own sentences that occupy me thus: I can get just occupied by the equally pointless challenge of rewriting the sentences of others. For instance, in his book How Soccer Explains the World Franklin Foer gives us this: "Barcelona fans threw projectiles on the field, including sandwiches, fruit, golf balls, mobile phones, whiskey bottles, bike chains, and a severed bloody boar's head." Now, when I read that sentence this was my first and virtually my only thought: Should it really be "severed bloody boar's head"? That doesn't sound right. How about "bloody severed boar's head"?—no, that's not any better, probably because of the unnecessary information: if you have a bloody boar's head to throw, doesn't it go without saying that it has been severed? I mean, otherwise you'd just have a whole boar, wouldn't you? Clearly, the sentence would have been stronger had it ended, " … whiskey bottles, bike chains, and a bloody boar's head." Yes! Much better!
This is perhaps not the path of sanity, or virtue either for that matter. John Updike was widely reviled, and rightly so I think, for using the collapse of the World Trade Center towers as an opportunity for making beautiful sentences: "Smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure's vertically corrugated surface," he wrote in The New Yorker; one of the towers "fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air." Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic offered the most incisive critique of Updike's approach: "Such writing defeats its representational purpose, because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. It is provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy. Its precision is a trick: it appears to bring the reader near, but it keeps the reader far. It is in fact a kind of armor: an armor of adjectives and adverbs. The loveliness is invincible." The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda made the same point in one of his poems: "and the blood of children ran through the street / without fuss, like children's blood." Neruda, among the most metaphorically extravagant of poets, knew that in this case metaphor or simile would be obscene.
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