the perfect paragraph
Before I knew what anyone thought of it I read it, and I was in awe of it. I knew this to be an unbelievably rare perfection. The first paragraph of “A Farewell to Arms”:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
It's brought up in the Burns documentary. Didion knew it. I keep coming back to it, like who knows how many others, breaking it apart and putting it back together. There aren't enough adjectives to describe it. Like sitting in the Rothko room at the Tate.
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
It's brought up in the Burns documentary. Didion knew it. I keep coming back to it, like who knows how many others, breaking it apart and putting it back together. There aren't enough adjectives to describe it. Like sitting in the Rothko room at the Tate.