Sentences about Sentences

From "My Life's Sentences" by Jhumpa Lahiri

Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail. They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. 

Hamilton Cain: Playing with Parts of Speech

Changing nouns or adjectives into verbs--prioritize, activate--is a natural part of our ever-changing  language, even though many writers and editors hate such forms. Multi-syllabic verbs with Latinate suffixes can indeed bog down our sentences. But a skilled writer, by turning a word on its ear and slipping it into an unusual place in a sentence, can illuminate meaning in an original and pleasing way.

Hamilton Cain is one such writer, as seen in these sentences from his memoir This Boy's Faith:

     a screen door resined with insects

    Now she’d embedded herself in the ball of my skull, where she preyed like a Venus flytrap on the thoughts that buzzed there, her leaves hinged open, waiting to spring.

    the muddy, serpentine rivers that veined the South

   The path horseshoed behind the falls.

    He lunged across the blanket and hooked Craig in an elbow vise, toppling Trudie’s Fanta can and geysering fizz over her baloney sandwich and a slick of wax paper.

    I’d bask in the spiritual passion raying out from the canvases of Tiepolo and Fra Angelico at the Metropolitan Museum.

You have to be a writer of great instinct and precision to use this technique well. The new form of the old word has to fit smoothly in the sentence, enhancing the meaning without drawing attention to itself. I've seen awkward, self-conscious attempts that make me cringe, so finding a writer who does it sparingly and subtly is a joy.

Cain gives a verb a different kind of twist here:

    There’s a raft of poinsettias along the marble-topped Lord’s Supper table, in florist poses around the pulpit, a swath of crimson that aches the eyes, beautifully static, petals crisp as wax paper.

Ache is a common verb (as well as a noun), at least when used intransitively: My head aches. Cain makes it transitive--taking an object, eyes--and this small twist adds a bit of poetry to the sentence.