Free How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish Page B

should go on I still do feel that it should go on but when I first began writing I was completely possessed by the necessity that writing should go on and if writing should go on what had colons and semi-colons to do with it, what had commas to do with it what had periods to do with it what had small letters and capitals to do with it to do with writing going on which was at the time the most profound need I had in connection with writing.
    ( Lectures in America , 1935)
    Colons, commas, periods, and capital letters segment a reality that is continuous and made up of discrete, intensely realized moments. Immediacy, not linear reflection leading to a conclusion, is the goal here, and to reach it Stein must at once write sentences and somehow defeat the deferral of meaning—the sense of building toward a completed thought—that is the very nature of a sentence. Usually a sentence does not deliver its meaning until the end, and only at the end do its components acquire their significance and weight. But what Stein wants is meaning to be present at every instant, to be always the same in weight and yet different as each word is different. Before Flaubert and Cézanne, she explains, “composition had consisted of a central idea to which everything else was an accompaniment and separate but was not an end in itself.” But then “Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and it impressed me enormously,” and as a consequence, she continues, “I tried to convey the idea of each part of a composition being as important as the whole” (“A Transatlantic Interview,” 1946). Indeed, it is composition itself—arranging elements in a linear design—that is the enemy of this effort in Stein’s eyes: “Everything is the same except composition and time” (“Composition as Explanation,” 1926), that is, before composition—putting things together to form a larger whole—spoils it by relating and subordinating.
    The insight is theological, although Stein probably doesn’t intend it that way. In a world created and presided over by an omnipresent God who fills all the available spaces, the distinctions between things, persons, and events are illusory, a function of a partial, divided, and dividing consciousness. The seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert says it succinctly: “We say amiss / This or that is, / Thy word is all if we could spell” (“The Flower”). If we would only stop spelling, stop laboring to put discrete significances together in an effort to combine them into a larger whole, we could see, theologians tell us, that the larger whole we seek is already everywhere and that our very efforts to apprehend it themselves signify it. But this would mean giving up or letting go of consecutive thought, of the impulse to predication and sentence making. And how in the world (a phrase meant literally) could we do that? It is impossible. Nevertheless, that impossibility is pretty much Stein’s project. I was groping, she says, “toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again and then everything being alike then everything very simply everything was naturally simply different and so I as a contemporary was creating everything being alike was creating everything naturally being naturally simply different, everything being alike” (“Composition as Explanation”). In this sentence likeness and difference, the basic constituents of a discourse that anatomizes and ranks, change places, go in opposite directions, come together again, are in the end made one. By insisting on the alikeness in value of every word, Stein also insists on the difference or uniqueness of every word. “I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word” (“A Transatlantic Interview”). The result is sentences that circle around again and