“It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood” is a line from narrator Thelonious Monk Ellison in Percival Everett’s Erasure. I mention the line a lot in classes, and its truth was driven home all over again in the first meeting of ENGL 101/431: Blackness, Love, and Justice.
In that class, we’re reading N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth, a trilogy that draws from the geological sciences. To get us thinking about geology and the characters we will meet, I asked everyone to answer the following question:
What’s your favorite rock?
I had intended it to be a simple question, but as soon as it popped out of my mouth it became clear that thinkers interpreted it in many ways that I wasn’t anticipating at the time. And all of the interpretations made absolute sense.
Was I, for instance, talking about rock music?
Was I invoking “rock” figuratively, as Steven Minurka wonders in his blog post or as Chevy did in this famous 90s commercial?
It is indeed “incredible”–amazing, really–“that a sentence is ever understood.”