After this came shaving, and combing, and brushing;
and when, having sprent the first part of the day in this way, we sat down on
the forecastle, in the afternoon, with clean duck trousers and shirts on,
washed, shaved, and combed, and looking a dozen shades lighter for it, reading,
sewing, and talking at our ease, with a clear sky and warm sun over our heads,
a steady breeze over the larboard quarter, studding sails out alow and aloft,
and all the flying kites abroad--we felt that we had got back into the
pleasantest part of a sailor's life.
A pretty long sentence, but well formed and perfectly appropriate to its purpose. It comes from Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast , published in 1840 when the writer was twenty-five years old. This delightfully descriptive book records Dana's trip from Boston to California as a merchant seaman at age nineteen. It was the first detailed description of life aboard a seagoing vessel written from the viewpoint of a seaman. Dana kept a full journal of the trip and felt a moral obligation to tell it all, especially the cruel life of the common seaman serving under a sadistic Captain. The episodes of cruelty and the daily life of hardship and danger are heightened in Dana's record when he contrasts them with moments of serenity and pleasure in sentences like this one.
Every word in the sentence, 100 of them, add up to the main point in the bottom line: the pleasantest part of a sailor's life. If an editor at Reader's Digest tried to delete even one word, there would be a serious loss of flavor in the sentence. The first part of the fairly lengthy paragraph where it appears shows the preparation the sailors made for the pleasantest part: the Sunday clean-up of their quarters and their bodies after a month of dirt accumulation--clearing out the forecastle, scrubbing and scraping the floor, drying and airing their bedding, washing and drying their filthy clothes, having a "freshwater wash" or bath with the sailors soaping and scrubbing, and dousing one another with buckets of water. At that point our sentence begins.
Our sentence describes a scene rather than an action, a still inserted into an action movie. The camera focuses on all aspects, the clean and refreshed sailors at center stage, enjoying their own company and the pleasant day and beautiful ship. With all our senses alerted, we share the pleasantest part of a sailor's life. The sailor's language is important to give the scene its flavor. The reader does not have to know the vocabulary of the sea, exactly what the forecastle, the larboard quarter, the studding sails, and flying kites are in order to share the feeling of the scene. (Of course, the experienced sailor reading it would feel closer to the scene. He would know, for instance, that the flying kites, the topmost sails, are abroad only in fair weather.) Dana was not parading his vocabulary inappropriately; he was using every means to convey the ambience of the scene at that moment. It took some doing for Dana to get it all into his sentence. "When...we sat down on the forecastle...[here is where the cargo of ambience comes] we felt that we had got back into the pleasantest part of a sailor's life." Without laboring the matter, we should point out that all the details have an appropriate and logical order, each part coordinated and subordinated properly with the other parts. All the spars and running lines are in order and the sentence sails.
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