“I sat in the chair and looked at the floor and prayed for Catherine.”
–From Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
The weakness of this sentence complicates Hemingway, with its hypotactic heart monitor beeping on the frantic “and.”
Adam Robinson is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems.
After reading William Gass’s essay “And” on that almost invisible conjunction, I don’t think I can ever take it, or any other word, for that matter, for granted:
Definitely– also the great opening word of Pound’s _Cantos_:
“And then went down to the ship…”