Sophomore Slump: The Art of the Only Sentence

Welcome to Sophomore Slump: The Art of the Only Sentence. 

This exhibit in the Museum of Unfinished Novels is brought to you in part by:

And by:

And by:

And by:

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Our tour begins on your left with one of the museum’s most treasured artifacts: a sentence penned by an anonymous woman known only to history as Judas’s Lover, a sentence of such depth and possibility that it earned its own peer-reviewed journal in 1767.

Gregor Murray, the Scottish poet, once remarked there was no greater aphrodisiac to an American woman than the sentence of Judas’s Lover read aloud by a man with a Scottish accent. Unfortunately, the museum does not employ a man with a Scottish accent.

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Our next sentence comes from Annabelle Martin, a transgender woman who passed away in 1632 after being bitten by a Virginian swamp snake.

Ms. Martin’s letters to her parents in England go into great detail about the chapter book she planned to write. The chapter book was inspired by a story she overheard during her voyage across the Atlantic on The George from London.

It seems one of the other passengers on The George had been taken hostage by a band of pirates as a child and had lived among them for almost eleven years, during which time he was kept in a medium-sized box. The pirates only allowed the boy to exit the box when the sun was down and most of the pirates were asleep. No one was allowed to speak to him, and if he ever tried to speak to them, they gave him a black eye and a fat lip. The pirates fed the boy enough to keep him healthy and alive, though he never discovered what for.

Sometime in his tenth year with the pirates, his captors lost a one-sided battle to what sounded to the child in his box like a tremendous and well-trained fleet. Though they escaped with their lives, the pirates’ ship suffered too much damage to continue. They hobbled their way to an island off the coast of northern Africa, where they snuck into a poorly protected harbor, slaughtered some merchants, and stole another ship. The pirates abandoned their now-teenage hostage locked inside his box on a beach of the island (thoughtfully, the pirates stranded the box above the beach’s high-water mark).

As you can see from Ms. Martin’s sentence before you, her chapter book never made it further than introducing her as-yet-to-be-named heroine as a woman in possession of long and luxurious hair. As you can also see, the character’s hair color will remain forever undetermined.

***

In 2014, in the city of Rochester, New York, Jacob “Jake” Thibodeau told his father he wanted to write a book. Jake was just three years old at the time, but his father was the famous novelist, Richard Thibodeau, and Mr. Thibodeau wanted to indulge his son’s sense of imagination and creativity.

Mr. Thibodeau retrieved a box of Crayola Crayons from the bottom shelf of the television cabinet, tore a leaf of paper from a dotted-lined notebook the boy’s mother had given him last Christmas, and told young Jake to begin.

If you look closely at the way the sentence is punctuated — the proper use of the semi-colon throughout the turtle’s rant, the correct placement of the comma within the quotation marks, the appropriate use of an em dash rather than a hyphen — you can’t help but conclude that Mr. Thibodeau himself wrote the sentence onto the paper, and that Jacob, the sentence’s purported author, most likely had nothing to do with it.

While the Rochester City Court disagrees with our expert analysis, the Museum of Unfinished Novels will continue to note here in this tour and there on that placard above the exhibit that Mr. Thibodeau is, indeed, the author of this sentence, and we trust, should Mr. Thibodeau’s name ever appear (as it very well may) on the short list for the Man Booker Prize or some other highly reputable literary award, the judges will consider the way he continues to destroy his honor as a writer by refusing to acknowledge his authorial role in the creation of this sentence.

***

The name of the writer of this next sentence is lost to history. Experts can tell from the age of the paper and the chemicals in the ink that it was written in France in the late 1180s; unfortunately, we do not know how it traveled from twelfth-century Burgundy to our museum’s twenty-first century P.O box because the sentence arrived as an anonymous donation in the spring of 2018.

Regardless, the Museum of Unfinished Novels is grateful for its journey. After you’ve read the sentence and recognize how clever the author could have made its book, we trust you are grateful too.

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As you read this next sentence, try to notice how it makes it feel like a woman’s rough fingers are massaging your bare shoulders: the callouses on her palms, the smell of onions on her skin. Now look at the other visitors around you. See? It’s not just you. And it’s not just people listening to this audio tour. Everyone who reads this sentence feels the woman’s fingers.

That’s how good its author could have been.

Her name was Julia McKinnon, of Greenville, North Carolina, and she intended the sentence to lead the reader into a deeply erotic novel, one in which the damp humidity of New Orleans plays a sultry part.

We are left to guess whose shoulders those fingers were massaging, or indeed, whose fingers they even were, because Ms. McKinnon passed away in 1981, forever silent on the subject.

***

You may now cross to the other side of the gallery.

***

You are looking at a Moleskin notebook and reading a sentence handwritten in purple ink. The sentence is satisfactory enough — any slightly affected homosexual-teenager could construct a sentence of the same weight and caliber — but it’s not the sentence that catches your notice. It’s the way the final pen stroke whisks upward at the end, as if the author was diverted at the last moment, maybe by a phone call or by the cry of a baby.

The writer never returned to the thought.

Whatever happened was of such import that it was worth allowing all the energy and inspiration that must have preceded this sentence — enough energy and inspiration to call the writer from the couch, drive him to find a notepad and pen, find a comfortable seat, sit and nibble on the cap for a few minutes before finally feeling courageous enough to set pen to paper, and then, just like that, just as he’s finishing the last word in the sentence, something calls out to him, and poof!, it’s gone, all of that build up, all of that energy and inspiration, gone, and all we have to remember it by is this, this lonely little sentence that probably wouldn’t have grown up into a finished novel of any significant worth but that still, for a moment, had at least some limited potential to be more than it became, a sentence not quite stillborn as much as lost in the transition from womb to cradle.

***

This next artifact is the first sentence of a man who hoped to rewrite the Bible. Talk about intimidating.

This man did not intend to provide a new translation of the Bible. He wanted to re-write it, not from memory but from the heart of the Holy Spirit. He sat silent at his keyboard for days, his fingers hovering over the letters, the chants of the Benedictine monks repeating in his headphones, not eating, not drinking, not sleeping. His back ached. His shoulders stiffened. His neck grew heavy. He emptied his bladder into a two-liter soda bottle with as much consciousness as he used to fill his lungs. His mouth dried, and he waited, like a leaf waiting for the sun to rise, and then, on the third day, it came, this sentence that lies before you. His eyes lit and his fingers surged, the tip tap tip and heavy thud of the spacebar, hovering fingers, tip tap tip, thud, tip tap, thud, the sentence pouring out of him, and him not even conscious, no ego, tip tap tip, thud, the heart of the Holy Spirit breaking through from the realm of spirit into the realm of matter, tip tap, thud, breaking through the mind of that glorious young man, and when he tapped in the period, he couldn’t help it, he broke down, unable to suffer any longer the infinite patience of his Lord.

The sentence was donated to the exhibit by the young man’s mother, who asked us to share its story while protecting the identity of its author, her only begotten son.

***

The author of this next sentence asked us to set it in a private room where a live pianist could improvise continuously at a fast tempo with spirit, playing throughout the museum’s day, at cost to the pianist.

As you can tell from the sentence, the author was exactly right to ask this of the museum; unfortunately, she could not convince a pianist to seriously consider the offer, and in the end, she agreed to let us place it with the others here in the gallery.

To accommodate her wishes as best we can, however, please take a moment to read her sentence while listening to John Rusnak play Chopin’s Etude Opus 25, Number 11, in a minor, allegro con brio.

***

The penultimate sentence in Sophomore Slump: The Art of the Only Sentence communicates in just three short words such utter banality that when one of our curators discovered it in the notebook of a young woman who had left it on a table in a university library in Oklahoma, he could not help but bring it back to the museum, explaining his discovery as evidence for the phenomenon of synchronicity.

Our curator had gone to the university to investigate a claim made earlier that month by a young Polynesian man. An engineering student had confessed to her lover (the young Polynesian man) that, when she was younger, she had stolen a thumb drive from the messenger bag of Anne Decatur, upon which she (the engineering student) discovered an unfinished novel begun by Decatur’s brother, himself a famous author who was tragically killed by a house that collapsed in on itself.

The young Polynesian man explained on the telephone that he would provide the museum with a copy of the unfinished novel for the price of $1,100. Our director negotiated him down to $750 with the stipulation that the museum would only pay the fee if the writer’s estate gave us permission to display it. The young Polynesian man agreed, and our curator boarded a train to investigate.

It was an obvious fake, of course, the product of a woman (the engineering student) infatuated with postmodern literature. Our curator explained in no uncertain terms that the museum’s lawyer would contact the young Polynesian man to discuss payment of our curator’s travel expenses.

Disappointed and disgusted with humanity, our curator sought sanctuary in the university’s library, where he sat for an hour, considered his life’s follies and gazed without intention at the lithe young co-eds who sat straight and proper at their keyboards or lazed gratuitously over a notebook. Without warning, one of the co-eds caught his eye and smiled at him, returning him to consciousness but not quickly enough to allow him to smile in return. The young woman did not look his away again, and a few minutes later, she stood and walked out of the library, leaving behind a blue-lined notebook filled mostly with diagrammatic notes on a series of lectures that focused on the religious history of early homo-sapiens. But flipping through the notebook, our curator found, tucked away on a seemingly random page, this one banal sentence that wishes beyond hope to inspire a full-throated novel.

We wish we could tell you our curator retrieved the notebook and returned it to the young woman and thus began a short but eventful courtship that resulted in, if not a passionate and loving marriage, at least a passionate and loving evening. But we cannot, for the curator fell in love, instead, with this sentence on the table before you. It occupied his attention for the next three days as he returned by train to the museum. He gave no thought to the young woman in the library who smiled so sweetly at him, no thought to the way her brown hair tucked behind her cute little ear; instead, he strategized how to explain the merit of this sentence to the museum’s executive director, how to argue in favor of its inclusion in Sophomore Slump: The Art of the Only Sentence knowing full well that many of his colleagues were just then returning to the museum with other (perhaps equally favored) sentences of their own.

As you can see, his argument was most persuasive.

***

This sentence, the final artifact in Sophomore Slump: The Art of the Only Sentence, was written in Wales in 1873 by the hand of Emrys the Bard as he lay unconscious on what would become his All-Hallow’s-Eve deathbed.

Witnesses agree that that the bard had been dead for several minutes before his left hand shot out from his side to snatch an unnoticed letter-opener from the end table next to his pillow. More delicate witnesses fainted from what they took to be his resurrection, while those with a more stoic constitution fixated their horror on the violence of the bard’s hand as it carved a series of letters deep into the wood of the bed frame. The bard’s eyes remain closed, his chest and breath were still, but his hand! — he carved away the wood with such vigor that all who bore witness used the same expression when describing it later to a local constable: it was as if whatever controlled the hand was clawing its way out of its grave.

Take a moment and read the words of the sentence again, for this is a sentence that comes to you from we know not where, in a voice we know not whose, and for a purpose we know not what, and yet there it is, speaking to you, implying a message of such significance that only a dead man’s hand was capable of delivering it.

If only whatever or whoever had possessed the energy to finish it.

***

We invite you to submit your only sentences using the comment box in the rotunda. Each week during the exhibit, our director will select an exemplar sentence from those submitted, and its author will receive a year-long pass to the museum and publication of their sentence on our website. We hope you consider submitting a sentence of your own.

You may now select your next track on this audio tour of the Museum of Unfinished Novels.

Thank you for visiting Sophomore Slump: The Art of the Only Sentence.