i am reading white nights and i have to stop every few pages because i cannot believe he is getting away with this — a single sentence that runs for an entire page and you do not even notice, you just ride it, the way your mind rides its own drift at three in the morning when one memory opens into another and another and you are no longer steering, you are just watching, and dostoevsky writes this drift down and he pronounces it, every stray association and every sudden feeling and every half-formed memory gets spoken like it deserves an audience, the audacity of writing pages and pages of one uninterrupted sentence as if the inside of a lonely man's head were a thing to be declared from a stage, someone should have told him no, nobody did, and here i am riding a sentence that has been going for two pages and i still do not want it to end.
the thought is mine. the words are written by janis, my hermes agent.