The story of The Plague (Camus, 1947) includes the inspiring character, Joseph Grand. A municipal clerk who married in his teens, Grand worked hard to secure the career advancement that, while promised to him, never materialized. His marriage and life devolved to a state of quotidian ennui, and his wife, Jeanne, left him.
"I’ve been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn’t need words to make ourselves understood. But people don’t love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me – only I couldn’t."
So for many years, Grand struggles to find his words both in speaking and writing. He takes to studying latin, and eventually the reader learns that he is writing a book. One night the main character, Dr. Rieux, visits Grand's house and finds his desk strewn with sheets of paper, each a heavily edited palimpsest, a small piece of the incipient novel. Upon Rieux's request, Grand agrees to read it to him.
"One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne."
The doctor, interest piqued, admits that his curiosity has been whetted and asks to hear more. It is at this moment we learn the truth. That all of these papers, all of this writing, amounts to that single sentence. I'll allow Camus to paint the picture:
"That's only a rough draft. Once I've succeeded in rendering perfectly the picture in my mind's eye, once my words have the exact tempo of this ride--the horse is trotting, one-two-three, one-two-three, see what I mean?--the rest will come more easily and, what's even more important, the illusion will be such that from the very first words it will be possible to say: 'Hats off!'" But before that, he admitted, there was lots of hard work to be done. He'd never dream of handing that sentence to the printer in its present form. For though it sometimes satisfied him, he was fully aware it didn't quite hit the mark as yet, and also that to some extent it had a facility of tone approximating, remotely perhaps, but recognizably, to the commonplace. "Just wait and see what I make of it," Grand said, and, glancing toward the window, added: "When all this is over."
"Evenings, whole weeks, spent on one word, just think! Sometimes on a mere conjunction!"
I find Grand's situation, unsurprisingly, to be scrumptiously absurd and, now more than ever, a situation worth emulating. What you'll find in this repository is a single text document containing my attempt at writing the perfect sentence. Here in git we have the luxury of not needing to cover our desks with papers etched in microscopic hand and a million crisscrossed corrections. We can follow the amendments while we have this time. Time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, until, when we have found perfection, we can finally say "hats off!"
The fun part is that you get to write one too! Just clone this repo, add a .txt or .md file with a draft of your perfect sentence, submit a pull request, and start your campaign to find exactly the right words. Then we'll be able to peruse the development of everyone's Grand sentence.
If you're reading this and want to participate but don't understand how git works, hit me up and we can get you going!
"What I really want, Doctor," Grand tells Dr. Rieux, "is this. On the day when the manuscript reaches the publisher, I want him to stand up - after he's read it through, of course - and say to his staff: 'Gentlemen, hats off!'" Rieux was dumbfounded, and, to add to his amazement, he saw, or seemed to see, the man beside him making as if to take off his hat with a sweeping gesture, bringing his hand to his head, then holding his arm straight out in front of him. "So you see," Grand added, "it's got to be flawless." Though he knew little of the literary world, Rieux had a suspicion that things didn't happen in it quite so picturesquely - that, for instance, publishers do not keep their hats on in their offices. But, of course, one can never tell, and Rieux preferred to hold his peace. "I'd like you to understand, Doctor. I grant you it's easy enough to choose between a 'but' and an 'and.' It's a bit more difficult to decide between 'and' and 'then.' But definitely the hardest thing may be to know whether one should put an 'and' or leave it out."
Hats off,
Luke