Walden, a summer morning in the doorway

Henry David Thoreau published 1854 430 characters easy

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.

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About this text

The passage comes from the chapter Thoreau called Sounds. He built the cabin himself for a little over twenty-eight dollars and listed every expense. Walden grew out of the journal he kept for most of his adult life. Project Gutenberg carries the full text.

Where this text comes fromWhat this passage describes is a man sitting in a doorway doing nothing for several hours, and it is meant to be provocative. The whole book is an argument that time spent not working is not time wasted, and the sentence enacts the claim by refusing to hurry: it accumulates for seventy-six words without a single full stop, in the same unhurried way it says the morning passed. A reader in a hurry finds it unbearable, which is rather the point.

What you might not noticeThe sentence covers a stretch from sunrise until noon without naming a single activity, only the sitting itself and what happened around it while he sat. Source

What it trainsSeventy-six words in one sentence makes this the longest unbroken run of any prose here, though two passages in verse and one in science go further still. That is 430 characters with a single full stop at the end and ten commas along the way. The exercise is stamina rather than skill: nothing in the vocabulary is difficult, no word passes eleven letters, and there are no hyphens or dashes at all. What breaks people is that the clauses keep the same shape, so after the fifth of the ten commas the eye starts predicting and stops reading. Three capitals, two of them inside sentences.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg