The Quest for the Perfect Sentence

Busy day today, so I just thought I'd share with you this little nugget of a sentence I came across last night, from Atonement by Ian McEwan.  It describes the atmosphere in London in the early days of World War II, before the Germans began bombing:

"The dead were not yet present, the absent were presumed alive."

Nifty.

That, by the way, is more or less an example of chiasmus--a sort of "reverse parallelism," where the elements of the first part of a sentence are switched around in the second part.  A simple example of chiasmus would be something like, "If you're looking for a fight, then a fight you shall have."  The writer uses the rhetorical device to express with a minimal number of words a relatively complex thought: Nobody in London was dying yet, and the soldiers who were away fighting in France could safely be assumed to be alive--at least until further information was revealed.  The sentence is pretty, too: beginning and ending on strong beats, it has a sort of "u-shaped" rhythm.  Well done, indeed, Mr. McEwan.

Found Perfection (A Brief Post)

As longtime followers know--

(DIGRESSION: And at this point, you're all longtime followers--we haven't gotten a new recruit in ages. The Solipsist needs fresh blood! Get on this, People! EOD)

(ADDITIONAL DIGRESSION: We sounded a little vampiric, just then. The Solipsist is not a vampire! Although he would like to be one. Get on this, too, People! EOAD)

--we have a semi-regular feature wherein we attempt to find "perfect sentences." It occured to us the other day, though, that we should not restrict our perfection-quest to matters linguistic. The world is full of perfection if one only allows oneself to spot it.

The human eye, for example, is so gosh-darn perfect that creationists hold it out as proof of God's existence, as nothing so thoroughly spot-on could conceivably have come about through something as messy as natural selection. (Why this should be the case is unclear to us, but willfully ignorant pseudo-scientists work in mysterious ways.) The egg, too, is a model of structural perfection--and it tastes great with cheese. And let us not overlook microwave popcorn; seriously, whoever came up with that one just, y'know, couldn't have done better.

So keep your perfect eyes out for more perfection, Solipsist Nation. And fry yourself up an omelet: You might get hungry during the search.

(Perfect image of a perfect egg from UNC's Health Care Weblog. And a perfect website it is, too!)