That is the final sentence of the short story Car Crash While Hitchhiking by Denis Johnson. I posted it on my Facebook a couple weeks ago, mostly just to constantly remind myself of how it made me feel that first time I read it. The punch in the face, the reeling. The narrator begins the story explaining that he’s under the influence of some kind of pill. He never explicitly states it, but the pills have made him some kind of omniscient, or at least given him that feeling. “I knew every raindrop by its name.” He knows the imminence of the crash he is about to experience along with the young family in the car, and he imbues his narrative with that tension. But he also doesn’t care.

There’s so much more I want to say, but I don’t want to ruin any more of the story for people who might read it. I just wanted to put a little more context behind that last sentence. “And YOU…” It’s almost like I’ve been accused of voyeurism: YOU, getting off on this destruction. I see some sort of veiled apology: you expect ME, a drugged-up failure of a hitchhiker to help you? I see it as an equalizer. “You ridiculous people,” who obviously have some mutual respect for ridiculousness after reading my circumstances. But it’s still the simple condescension – justified, I would say – that is most apparent, especially as the first acknowledgment of audience. You have no idea.

I think most of that analysis, though, came after my initial designation of the sentence as a thing of beauty. (Isn’t that how it usually goes?) I was challenged to think about it in a different way when I talked to Jesse about it the other day. He had seen it on my Facebook and also thought it was amazing. But he didn’t have the context I’d had. He saw it more as a self-sufficient entity, a universe unto itself. He wondered how you could fit so much in so little. We were trying to think of other sentences that evoke so much beyond themselves, simply.

I’ve come up with one, but I don’t know if it counts. There are no guidelines that define the kind of thing we were discussing. This one comes from one of my favorite poems, This Room and Everything in It, by Li-Young Lee. It’s not really even technically a sentence, such structures getting blurred there toward the end, but they’re still words put together. Words that have stuck.

“it had something to do with love.”

Anybody else have any sentences they love? Anybody think I’m crazy? Define crazy.