A cool wind wafts through open window, rustling through the papers I was trying to avoid grading. I watch as the tiny hairs on my arm wave in the breeze, performing what appears to be some sort of ritual dance celebrating the elements.
Nearby on my desk crawls a beetle. How he entered my office I have yet to discover. Most people use the door, but my multi-legged friend lacks the opposable thumbs necessary to turn the knob.
He looks busy, whatever it is he's doing. I imagine that he's aware of the meaninglessness of his life. It's hard to tell though, since the little guy does seem so sincere about his work. He's fast. I suppose that if I were equipped the triple my current number of legs I'd be pretty fast (though I'm guessing I'd be the butt of many jokes from my biped friends).
I hear these little fellas can lift 20 times their weight. He makes me look like more of a flabby nerd than I am. A cursory glance at my musculature will be enough for you to guess that I can't lift 20x my weight. What he doesn't realize, though, is that the joke's on him. He'll live another week or two, chomp a few leaves, and then bite the dust, leaving his exoskeleton resting in somebody's windowsill long after his soul has left his body.
I just don't think he sees the absurdity of it all. He runs around frantically, gathering food, doing whatever business bugs occupy themselves with, eating and breathing and perhaps sleeping. He'll go through several mating seasons, spawn a couple thousand larvae, and cry a few tears over the gorgeous but unattainable aphid who lives down the lawn. He may take a deep draught from the cup of bug-life and be a better bug for it. But in the end, he's just a dead bug. (I don't have the heart to tell him--he seems so happy running around with that big smile spread across his mandibles.) I tell him to be a nice bug, suspecting that he probably doesn't understand me.
He'll be lucky if he makes it through the next couple weeks. Outside he's got to worry about garter snakes, robins, and small bespectabled boys with magnifying glasses. Inside he may meet his Maker under the feet of some bug-deploring human. Or my pal may live to a ripe old age, seeing several generations of larvae and grandlarvae, who I hope will revere his grey head. Sooner or later, though, he's gone, and no one will give a flying flip what he did with his bug existence.
For now, though, I let him run around happily across my desk. When it comes time for me to hit the sack, I'll place him outside, give him one last look, and try to remember to be nice to the bugs.
Posted by jonsligh at March 3, 2006 12:45 AMwhen I lived in louisiana (3rd and 4th grade), I developed a sort of bond with the insect life that would frequently pay visits indoors at our house. The crickets were especially ubiquitous, and I honed the art of grabbing their right hind leg and assisting them out the door, lest they keep me awake all night with their rambling.
moral: any insect that is big and slow enough for me to grab and remove from my area, yet that won't bite me, is an insect I'm OK with.
Posted by: Brade at March 3, 2006 04:29 PMsome primal termite knocked on wood
and tasted it, and found it good,
and that is why your cousin may
fell through the parlor floor today.
From pontifications, vol. 1, page 1:
Eschew verbosity.
-----------
Thus, the above should read:
I saw a bug. I am a wuss. I let him go.
Posted by: Aneurysmal at March 10, 2006 01:01 AMWow, Aneuysmal. That was amazing. You no doubt could carve out a career in Cliffnotes authorship.
The entry wasn't really supposed to be about bugs. It was supposed to be a melancholic reflection on the brevity of life and the ultimate pointlessness of most of what we do.
Posted by: sligh at March 10, 2006 09:04 AMPoint taken.
But if I may be a critic (which is rather easy to be as an anonymous stranger/jerk), I do think the passage is verbose. Your meaning/communication is sacrificed to verbal aesthetics. Yes, it has some great phrases and even sentences, but the sum of it is heavyish and unpointed. Flesch-Kincaid would have a proverbial aneurysm (wait a sec...are aneurysms proverbial?)
Anyways, to beat a dead horse, it's like I'm eating a large mouthful of mashed potatoes when what I'd really like is multiple spoonfuls with butter in each bite.
Posted by: Aneurysmal at March 12, 2006 12:26 AMDo you think maybe the impossibly long paragraphs helped make it seem more unreadable? Do the new paragraph divisions, arbitrary as they might be, help?
Anyway, thanks for the input, Aneurysmal. I'm actually quite welcoming to criticism. I'm a firm believer in the principle that literary dung should be identified as such. So feel free to critique/naysay/evaluate to your heart's content.
Posted by: sligh at March 12, 2006 12:46 AMThat helps some, but I still feel some sentences are overly wordy or confusing. I don't think I'm lazy or dumb (though my girlfriend calls me both :). It's just that I find myself dealing with alot of nice, but non-meaningful clauses.
Example:
I imagine that he's got to be at least a little cognizant of the meaninglessness of his life, though perhaps only dimly aware that something exists outside of his bug life, something presumably more meaningful.
Perhaps I'm too Hemingway-esque, but I'd prefer:
I imagine that he's aware of the meaninglessness of his life.
Posted by: Aneurysmal at March 12, 2006 01:23 AMHmmm... Verbosity has always been a secret indulgence of mine.
Posted by: sligh at March 12, 2006 01:57 AMJon, don't listen to this person.
I for one love Hemingway and the Dude would never write a sentence as bland as the example (s)he gave. Personality is vital in writing, which is why my cool teachers always liked my writing and why the boring ones never did. OK, so maybe it was more like I decided who the cool teachers were after they told me they liked my writing.
Sure, almost anybody's writing can be tweaked a little, made more concise. But if concision becomes the name of your game, Aneurysmal, you've come to oh so sad a place, my friend. Why focus on limiting yourself rather than going somewhere? By the way, the word concision is actually a fair summary of this essay. A little better than that cardboard "Hemingway" sentence.
OK, and if I know you, just take this all in jest. :-) And don't hurt me.
Posted by: Will at March 13, 2006 10:14 PMWhoa, whoa--I'm expecting a barroom brawl to burst forth any minute now.
I, being the perennial fencewalker that I am, will side with both fellows. I don't know if Aneurysmal is a regular, but if he is he may have previously noticed my fondness for long strings of dependent clauses and rogue prepositional phrases.
To Will, though, I extend a hearty thanks. I am vindicated. But what the entry you see is an edited one--I went through and ironed out my long convoluted sentences after receiving Aneurysmal's critiques. By the way, Will, can you tell me what I'm supposed to do with my new French press coffee maker? I don't know how long to let it steep or what the coffee/water ratio should be. It sits on my desk, lonely and unused, a testament to startling deficiency in coffee-brewing skills.
As sligh has noted, the entry you see now is not the one I had oringinally critiqued (by the way, I enjoy this version much better). Furthermore, the "bland sentence" you referred to as being mine was not mine at all, but part of Jon's original entry that no longer appears.
Secondly, I did not state that concision trumps personality, and to suggest that it may be the "name of [my] game" is a little presumptuous, as I am a perfect stranger to you as you are to me (i.e. I'm not going to draw conclusions based on the fact that you called Hemmingway a "Dude").
Again, my entries on this thread are based on Jon's old entry. I know this is a blog, which allows more anonimity and thus, more charged discussion that even an Irish pub would allow, but please do not draw conclusions about strangers so quickly.
Cheers.
Posted by: Aneurysmal at March 14, 2006 06:20 PMWow, Jon. Your writings have started quite a spirited debate. I think I shall add you to my short list of "Friends Who May or May Not Become Revolutionaries."
In the end, it's true that this entry and its comments have evolved and you can't judge anybody by the current state.
But that said, I shall still opine at will since, as a human, I feel the need to argue any subject I am even mildly competent in. Besides, as I know neither party, I am of course, a subjective analyst. So there...
I think that just because someone is trumpeting one facet of a subject doesn't mean that he thinks that facet as being the most important or all others as being not important. A speaker that lectures on justice is by no mean shoving grace aside. It's simply not the subject at hand. Thus, it seems that Aneurysmal is simply harping on conciseness(but may very well appreciate a personality that drives a well strung out sentence).
Also, it's my experience that writers often mistake good writing with multi-metaphors and thesaura-words at the expense of that which is lucid and communicative. Perhaps that was Aneurysmal's concern -- I don't know. I personally think one should master the latter and then indulge in the former.
But then again, the only publishing I ever get is on that dilipidated blog of mine...
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