#JAMES WOOD, HOW FICTION WORKS#
If prose is to be as well written as poetry novelists and readers must develop their own third ears. We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why a metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.

There is a way in which even complex prose is quite simple - because of that mathematical finality by which a perfect sentence cannot admit of an infinite number of variations, cannot be extended without aesthetic blight: its perfection is the solution to its own puzzle; it could not be done better.

LANGUAGE 113,114
摘于07/23/2026 #分别善恶知识树上的果子#