“A Brief Crack of Light Between Two Eternities of Darkness” →

Novelist Ben Dolnick, for NYT Opinion:

Here’s something I used to think about, back in the before-times: A clause set off by em dashes is like dropping underwater while swimming breaststroke — just a quick dip before popping back to the sentence’s surface. A parenthetical clause is more like diving down to the pool bottom to pick up a coin. And a footnote is a full-blown scuba dive — you have strapped on equipment and left the surface behind and you had better, after going to all that trouble, see something interesting down there.

How was it that I had never noticed that this entire taxonomic system of authorial interruptions took for granted that readers would enjoy being plunged into a medium in which they couldn’t take a breath?

John Gruber:

Simultaneously an astute observation on writing and a spot-on assessment of our collective moment.

Back to Dolnick:

But then I happened upon a line by Nabokov (the author, incidentally, of perhaps the only truly famous parentheses in world literature):

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

This majestically depressing sentence worked on me like fresh water in a vase of lilies. At last, the true absurd hopelessness of things, laid out in flawless prose!