Whether you understand much or little of what the following sentence by the art historian Herbert Read is saying will scarcely matter for our grammatical purposes here. What concerns us is the shape, or construction, of this architectural sentence, understanding which can make us both more sophisticated readers and acute thinkers.
Read is prefacing here a collection of essays (Aspects of Form, 1951) on the impossibly difficult subject of form in the natural and artistic worlds, and he wants to affirm the increasing scientific conclusion that in nature and art, we humans both perceive and perceive meaning by recognizing patterns. The idea has been standing for a long time, Read says, but it has been spottily recognized and inconsistently explained. He then launches a formidable ninety-word sentence whose blueprint we must understand both to appreciate and profit from. So, sit up straight, take a deep breath, and begin:
But now the revelation that perception itself is essentially a pattern-selecting and pattern-making function (a Gestalt formation); that pattern is inherent in the physical structure or in the functioning of the nervous system; that matter itself analyses into coherent patterns or arrangements of molecules; and the gradual realisation that all these patterns are effective and ontologically significant by virtue of an organisation of their parts which can only be characterised as aesthetic—all this development has brought works of art and natural phenomena on to an identical plane of enquiry.
I, for one, could add no more than a nickel’s worth of intelligent commentary to the idea Read is alluding to here, but to understand the structure of this sentence and to learn literarily from its construction, we need little more than to comprehend the basic meaning, not the philosophical complexities, of the words he is using. Read’s sentence beautifully examples certain design techniques we can incorporate into our own sentences, while at the same time illustrating the thesis he is expounding about the significance of recognizing patterns.
We should see first that this one sentence comprises two independent clauses, the first hidden in the four opening words (more on that in a moment), and the second after the dash. What stands between these two points are the four subordinate clauses beginning with the conjunction that, and a fifth relative clause (beginning which can) making up a subsidiary part of the fourth that clause. Our first sketch of this extensive sentence, then, lays down these three pins: main clause + five dependent clauses + independent clause, and that will stabilize Read’s quite involved assertion within the bounds of one enunciation.
The first main clause, But now the revelation, is an elliptical clip of But now the revelation comes, where the simple subject revelation has the hidden verb comes (or some similar verb) as its predicate. The ellipsis, along with the initial coordinating conjunction, whips onto their circus platforms the four pondering subordinate clauses to follow, each of which constitutes a noun clause standing in apposition to the noun revelation. Because of their weight, that is, the substantial idea each is articulating, they are separated by semicolons, not commas, and this is the rule when any one such series of clause has internal punctuation of its own (here the parentheses in the first one). Substitute commas for a moment and read the sentence again; you’ll see how the discipline of those grammatical animals falls apart and they begin to run around pell-mell on stage.
The fact that each of these four subordinate clauses begins with the conjunction that (I am regarding the phrase and the gradual realisation as just a synonym for revelation) is rhetorically significant. Beginning three or more clauses with the same word or phrase constitutes a figure of speech called anaphora, a common way, despite its forbidding name, to construct involved sentences (politicians are particularly fond of it). The technique works to establish a parallelism in the sentence structure, which is inherently organizing and therefore likely to render the assertion more authoritative and trustworthy. What is orderly is rational and what is rational is meaningful (whether in the end morally good or not).
Finally, the dash. We use it primarily to emphasize an idea, whether logically or emotionally, by separating, but not isolating, it from the previous thought from which it arises. A dash produces energy in a sentence by breaking the syntax already established, and when Read attaches the independent clause at the end of the long, subordinated statement with this device, he means to summarily announce the result of all the developments he has just presented. Of course he could have simply put a period after aesthetic, erased the dash, and begun a new simple sentence. That choice, however, would have moved the reader’s attention to another corner of the stage where the thought was taking shape on its own; the conditions (all those subordinate clauses) and their combined result (this final independent clause) would have been separated and the energy dissipated from the two placed astride each other, as we now read it in the original.
If it is true that we master a skill by watching a master work, then a little practice like the one we undertook here can make us more confident in both reading and writing more intricate sentences involving complex ideas. Making something well, be it a pot of clay or a sentence of words, ultimately depends on the way we bind together the what we want to express with the how whereby we do it. When something is difficult, even unfamiliar, first look closely at its form. Structure isn’t everything, but without it, there will be little meaningful to discover.
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