From Thomas Ligotti’s story, “Autumnal.”
“And we are always dreaming of the day when all the fires of summer are defunct, when everyone like a shriveled leaf sinks into the cooling ground of a sunless earth, and when even the colors of autumn have withered for the last time, dissolving into the desolate whiteness of an eternal winter.”
Ligotti’s sentences–nevermind the stories themselves–are a strange mix of metaphor and simile, lurching serpentine through the sensorial and the memorial, infused by both the disorienting logic of dreams, and the real-life image-rot of urban decay, the blight of terror zones like post-rustbelt, meteor-wreck Detroit; and this sentence, specifically, with its nature-language, with its snuffing out of the sun, is as complete and full as any I’ve ever read, a sentence that sums up, in totality, not only the sad beauty of the life-cycle (we start with the “fires of summer,” lose our color, and dissolve into “desolate whitenes”), but also the cold, unrelenting, ever-expanding texture of time and the universe itself–no small feat, by any measure.
David Peak is the author of Surface Tension.