Sentences

If you live long enough, especially if you have children, you will inevitably utter sentences without precedent in human history. “No, don’t put Michelangelo in Hurricane’s butt,” I told my 3-year-old on Tuesday. “Michelangelo” is one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. “Hurricane” is our cat.

On Thursday, I found a similarly unlikely formulation in a more elevated venue. As a break between reading books for review, I have been reading Frederick Brown’s beautifully written and researched Flaubert, a biography of the novelist. On page 148, after reporting that Flaubert’s friend, Alfred Le Poittevin, had urged him to read Spinoza, Brown writes of Le Poittevin:

“Sapped by a weak heart, and at one point burning with gonorrhea, he found alcohol more helpful than Spinoza in his attempt to escape from the slough of despond.”

The Bunyan reference cinched it for me. Imagine the Glen Baxter illustration that might accompany that sentence.