First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

The smaller the country the larger the stamps. He who lives alone is always on sentry duty. When our friends leave us, they take away our shores. One of Hamilton Finlay’s last exhibitions, in Edinburgh in 2005, was simply titled ‘Sentences’. All the exhibits were monostichs, one-sentence poems, painted in different colours on the white walls, like

Rhythm is the song of life. The syllabic stress patterns of speech sync up with the heartbeat we hear in the womb, the pulses of air in the lungs, the strides of walking and running. Beating a rhythm is our first music, the joyous reflex that makes us tap feet, drum fingers and clap hands. To the young man carrying a pair of battered drumsticks eve

For Henry David Thoreau, the sentence was the harvest gleaned in a writer’s brain. ‘The fruit a thinker bears is sentences,’ he wrote

words are the world’s gift to us all, as free as light and air.

In writing, meaning derives from just four things: syntax, word choice, punctuation and typography. These four things, in that order of importance, must stand in for the unique print of a human voice.

Only later do we see that the world is not so easily pinned down, and that everything bleeds into everything else. For this we need verbs.

‘Attention,’ wrote the French thinker Simone Weil, ‘is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ Give your sentences that courtesy and they will repay you.

The purest form of love is just caring – paying someone else the compliment of your curiosity and holding them in your head, if only for a moment. The purest form of praise is to pay attention.

Our first instinct with words is to label and sort.