Khirbet Khizeh

 

This quote is one long run-on sentence. It's Not quite William Faulkner long. But it's got that same architectural integrity. One image becomes one scene; encapsulated in one sentence.Originally written in Hebrew in 1949, it wasn't translated into English until 2008.

"One man, with a prodigious mustache, sat at the edge of the circle patiently rolling a cigarette in his dark peasant hands, transforming the lap of his robe into a tiny workshop for the purpose, gathering up the crumbs of tobacco and packing and tamping them in the trumpet of paper, tapping it this way and that,  fussing with his flint and tinder until it finally produced a glow, which was nurtured with blowing and shielded with the cup of his hand, and lit, raising for his enjoyment a pungent cloud of smoke, demonstrating the last scrap of freedom remaining in his possession, and also some hope for a future, a sort of everything-will-be-alright that someone always kindled through wishful thinking, which he immediately believed in as though it were the first step toward salvation and even infected his neighbors with his good faith —such a fine quality, which was now made all the more pathetic and gullible since you (like the Lord in Heaven, as it were) knew what he did not know yet."

Expanding on that architecture metaphor, that sentence is a high-rise among strip malls. The cigarette becomes an obvious symbol of freedom, then is instantly denigrated as "wishful thinking", it's salvation, and then it's pathetic. There is a whole story arc here, which I can tell you is representative of the whole.