The best writers tell you exactly why you want to read a book in the very first sentence or two. And, at the end of the book, at the very last one or two sentences, they tell you why you're glad you it. This also applies to poems and short stories. In this diary, I test this theory. For example, suppose it's 1846, and you're reading a little story that begins:
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had born as best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat.
That's a good hook, and it's gonna sell a lot of magazines. Many novels were published serially, before TV, radio, internet, etc., and you had to hit 'em hard and fast. Hence perhaps the most famous opening sentence of all:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
Below the fold, I give some other favorite openers and closers and invite you to submit your own.
One of my favorites:
One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children playing on slopes, housewifes lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.
And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open.
And this next opener has inspired at least two first rate films:
No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.
Good writing is honest writing. I present ... Exhibit A:
The objects of this autobiography, written at the age of thirty-three, are simple enough: an opportunity for a formal goodbye to you and to you and to you and to me and to all that; forgetfulness, because once all this has been settlled in my mind and written down and published it need not never be thought about again; money.
... and Exhibit B:
In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers' table.
Every poet, wittingly or unwittingly, writes his own obituary. Yeats ("horseman pass by") was one, but the best was this:
And alien tears will fill for him,
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
Lytton Strachley wrote the classic closing sentence in his masterpiece Queen Victoria where Strachey's great talent takes the reader back through the dying queen's memories to the trees and the grass at Kensington.
But my own, less famous closing was written by C.V. Wedgwood, and has continued application to our times:
"This Man against whom the Lord hath witnessed," said Cromwell.
But the King had read the will of the Almighty in a different sense and had been equally sure that God was with him.
Our Cromwellian friends on the Republican side might be wise to consider this last one.