A Sentence

I have let this blog lapse. I have been so busy writing the instructor materials for my database book, that I have had little time or energy for anything else. At last, I am nearing the end of that task. My web site keeps getting redesigned in my mind, but, for it too, I have had little time.

I am going to return to this blog, but for now I am going to abandon any larger plans about its purpose and topics. I will just write.

Currently, this late November evening, with small patches of white hiding in the shadows from rains that have melted all the other pre-thanksgiving snows, I have a desire to write a sentence, a complex sentence, a labyrinth, really, of phrases and clauses in which the unwary reader can wander lost in a sea of particulars,the night rain rattling on the black of the window panes, any trace of the subject and verb long lost, hidden away like the orphan snow under a dripping eve; a sentence written, that is to say, in the manner of the late Henry James, in novels like the Wings of the Dove, in which any hint of an idea, any taint, any stain of a philosophical nature, dissolves into the mystery of the immediate; a sentence, furthermore, which will not fit into a tweet, which any editor would cut with an indignant stroke of a pen, and which most modern readers, if the term can be applied, will find unreadable.