Pretty sentences

instrumentality vs autotelicity

I’m currently in the middle of Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness and so far it’s one of my favorite novels ever. There was a sentence in it that stood out to me:

It was spring, and the rain had knocked the plum blossoms off the trees, and the pale pink petals lay plastered against the wet pavement. (13)

I loved this sentence. It made me feel something. But I was surprised at how much it made me feel, because I am usually irritated by sentences like this.

There is a wide genre of writing that is full of such sentences. Much fiction, much narrative nonfiction, and many artsy Substack posts. Sentences that set the scene, that go into painstaking detail about the surroundings of the story, but that don’t add to the story itself in any legible way. I have often struggled to see the “point” of such sentences. They have felt like the filler I have to wade through in order to get to the real “meat” of the book I’m reading – either the action (if I’m reading fiction), or the insights (if I’m reading nonfiction). Those are the things I am really reading for.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate such sentences more. They’ve begun to glow. The core shift has been from what Tyler Alterman calls “instrumentality” towards “autotelicity” (or: The Church vs Mystics; The Enlightenment vs Romanticism). “Instrumentality/autotelicity” are two big words which capture something simple: whether you are doing a thing for some purpose beyond itself (it is instrumental towards something else), or whether you are doing its own sake (autotelic - from the greek auto meaning self, and telos meaning purpose).

My arc as a reader has been to embrace autotelicity more over time. There is something beautiful in the mere description of “pink petals plastered against the wet pavement.” Sure, it serves some purpose beyond itself – in this case, depicting the gloomy mood of a rainy day, right after a mother and her child attend the funeral of the boy’s dad. But really, the value of the sentence is inherent to the sentence itself. There is a beautiful metaphor in it (the petals being plastered in the same way that a wallpaper can be plastered onto a wall). There is also a satisfying alliteration – pale pink petals plastered pavement. There is even a rhythm to it, with each clause in the sentence getting progressively longer and more detailed.

One way to appreciate beautiful sentences for the sake of themselves is simply to get older. The older you get, the more experiences you have, and the more experiences you have, the more you can draw on when absorbing other people’s descriptions of their experiences. If you’ve never seen paper plastered onto a wall nor seen petals on the pavement after a rainy day, the connection between the two wouldn’t be striking to you. If you’ve never had the experience of grief and the juxtapositions involved in it—the sense of both gratitude for what was and sadness for what’s been lost—the contrast of grey skies and colorful blossoms wouldn’t mean as much to you.

But the bigger impediment to enjoying these sentences is the belief that your reading has to be constantly getting you somewhere. It takes presence and gratitude to appreciate the act of such an aimless activity as reading a book – and not just any book, but a novel in particular. And not just a novel that is packed with drama, but the kind that meanders, the kind that takes its time. It is a kind of rebellion in our world to appreciate such works; our world where every action is framed in the service of a greater cause, in the service of some instrumental benefit like more power or prosperity. It is rebellious to let the sentence stand on its own, to read the sentence, to look at the petals plastered on the pavement, to look without any further agenda than looking itself.