Tuesday 28 December 2010

It Was Raining

It was raining, what more is there to say. . . . But maybe there's  plenty more, and where would we be if our writers were content to just say it was raining, what more was there to say, and leave it at that?
"Corrugated tears, molten, involate, were voicelessly descending with all the unceasing and pitiless rhythm of an African demagogue, bloated and gorged on the accumulated fats of his tarnished and burnished native lands."
That's the kind of thing you could say - and people would thank you for it. Why wouldn't they? To be honest though,  I admit I'm a bit lost as to the sense of that revised or alternative sentence, but that's just me. And anyway where would our writers be without vagueness, that is I mean the most refined vagueness, and within those vaguenesses lying hidden, or half-hidden, or maybe fully hidden, the most precious metals, so to speak, whose invaluable essences are discovered by only the most civilized and penetrating of readers, who can then reward themselves, if they want, mentally, with the thought that their achievement in the discovering is as, or at least nearly as, great as the writer's who hid them there in the first place. And who's to argue with that.

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