run-ons

He felt that he had fallen on the soft and thick cushion while his body, light
and weightless, had been run through by a sweet feeling of beatitude and
fatigue and was losing consciousness of its own material structure, that heavy,
earthy substance that defined it, placing it in an unmistakable spot on the
zoological scale and bearing a whole sum of systems, geometrically defined organs
that lifted him up on the arbitrary hierarchy of rational animals. His
eyelids, docile now, fell over his corneas the same natural way with which his
arms and legs mingled in a gathering of members that were slowly losing their
independence, as if the whole organism had turned into one, single, large, total
organism, and he --the man-- had abandoned his mortal roots so as to penetrate
other, deeper and firmer, roots: the eternal roots of an integral and definitive
dream. Outside, from the other side of the world, he could hear the
cricket's song growing weaker until it disappeared from his senses, which had
turned inward, submerging him in a new and uncomplicated notion of time and
space, erasing the presence of that material world, physical and painful, full of
insects and acrid smells of violets and formaldehyde.

Three sentences from "The Other Side of Death" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the stories in a collection of his that I'm currently reading. These kinds of sentences are common in Marquez's work, and I generally really like anything he's written. But they're so long, WTF. It takes me awhile to sink down into (and I really think that's the best way of phrasing what needs to happen for me to understand his work) his writing. It's just so different from how I use language myself, slow-moving maybe. Any one who knows me well knows that I generally do things as quickly as I can. Sometimes when I'm just washing dishes or getting dressed I get out of breath from moving too fast. (Also, I'm out of shape, apparently.)

I can't articulate exactly why, but this need to adjust my language-intaking-process reminds me of this project that I just did this summer. I'll be thinking some more about this.