The Best Opening Lines Of 2021

From 7 words to 172 words, these were the best opening lines I read this year

Welcome to Range Widely, where I hope to help you think new thoughts for a few minutes each week.

This is the last post of the year! As always, you can see previous posts here, and you can subscribe here:

Thank you to everyone who stopped by in 2021.

I’ve already read a bunch of year-end roundups of the best books and movies. And I love ‘em! I shall read some of those books, and probably watch some of those movies. But I figured I’d try something different.

Below are my favorite openings from books (and one article, and two speeches) that I read this year. That doesn’t mean they were published this year — most were not — but I read (or reread) them this year.

The awards envelope, please. (This is high-stakes stuff, people; careers are made and lost here.) And the winners are…

Travel Writing

“Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.”

Thus begins D.H. Lawrence’s travel book Sea and Sardinia. It’s so abrupt and so unusual that it grabbed me. Instantly, I felt in my bones the sensation he was sharing. The drive to move, to go somewhere and see something different.

It also reminded me of the opening paragraph of The Narrow Road to Oku. Written by 17th century Japanese poet and travel writer Matsuo Basho, it’s probably the most famous paragraph in Japanese literature. I’m going to type it below rather than copy and paste — which I like to do sometimes just to feel great writing (translation by Donald Keene):

“The months and days are the travelers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them. Many of the men of old died on the road, and I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming.”

Biography

The long opening sentence of Paul Auster’s new biography of Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage:

“Born on the Day of the Dead and dead five months before his twenty-ninth birthday, Stephen Crane lived five months and five days into the twentieth century, undone by tuberculosis before he had a chance to drive an automobile or see an airplane, to watch a film projected on a large screen or listen to a radio, a figure from the horse-and-buggy world who missed out on the future that was awaiting his peers, not just the construction of those miraculous machines and inventions but the horrors of the age as well, including the destruction of tens of millions of lives in two world wars.”

Don’t try 105-word sentences at home, kids, unless you can write like Paul Auster, in which case do whatcha want.

Musical Biography

Yes, I’m just making up convenient categories. It’s my awards show! Check out these opening lines from Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, by Terry Teachout:

“He was the most chronic of procrastinators, a man who never did today what he could put off until next month, or next year. He left letters unanswered, contracts unsigned, watches unworn, and longtime companions unwed, and the only thing harder than getting him out of bed in the afternoon was getting him to finish writing a new piece of music in time for the premiere. “I don’t need time,” he liked to say. “What I need is a deadline!”

History

The magisterial opening lines of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rousseau and Revolution, by Ariel and Will Durant:

“How did it come about that a man born poor, losing his mother at birth and soon deserted by his father, afflicted with a painful and humiliating disease, left to wander for twelve years among alien cities and conflicting faiths, repudiated by society and civilization, repudiating Voltaire, Diderot, the Encyclopédie, and the Age of Reason, driven from place to place to place as a dangerous rebel, suspected of crime and insanity, and seeing, in his last months, the apotheosis of his greatest enemy—how did it come about that this man, after his death, triumphed over Voltaire, revived religion, transformed education, elevated the morals of France, inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoi, and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more influential than they had ever been before? Here, if anywhere, the problem faces us: what is the role of genius in history, of man versus the mass and the state?”

When I played basketball in high school, we’d tumble off the bench in a tizzy like a revivalist congregation when one of our guys dunked. I didn’t jump off my chair yelling when I read that opening, because that would be weird. (Albeit awesome. Maybe next time.) But I did feel pretty amped in my writer-heart.

Remember what I said about Auster? The Durants’ first sentence is practically a Twitter thread; it’s 172 words! When it works, it works.

YA

The opening line of the young adult sci-fi novel, The Pool of Fire, by John Christopher:

“Everywhere there was the sound of water.”

Simple, I know; even ordinary. But it reminded me of something one of my favorite writers, Sebastian Junger (author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm), said in an interview: “ ‘The rain pounded down’—fine… Good writing is good rhythm. Period. End of sentence.”

Nobel Lecture/Acceptance Speech

Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, who with Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, began his Nobel lecture this way:

“On the morning of October 8, I received a phone call from my mother. She wondered how things were going.

-Well, Mom, we’ve got the Nobel Prize …

-That’s nice. Anything else?”

And here is how Tanzanian-born British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the literature Nobel, opened his lecture:

“Writing has always been a pleasure. Even as a boy at school I looked forward to the class set aside for writing a story, or whatever our teachers thought would interest us, more than to any other class on the timetable. Then everyone would fall silent, leaning over their desks to retrieve something worth reporting from memory and imagination. In these youthful efforts, there was no desire to say something in particular, to recall a memorable experience, to express a strongly-held opinion or to air a grievance.”

Article

This Atlantic piece — “The Dark Power of Fraternities,” by Caitlin Flanagan — is a serious piece of investigative reporting. But the lead is an incredible mix of horror and humor:

“One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.”

Dante

Yeah, he gets his own category. For whatever reason, I’m always curious to see how different translations of Inferno cast the opening lines.

This year, I read one of the very few English translations (by Laurence Binyon) that preserves Dante’s original terza rima rhyme scheme (aba bcb cdc etc.).

English doesn’t have as many rhymes as Italian, so that’s a bold project. But I loved the foreboding opening lines:

“Midway the journey of this life I was ’ware

That I had strayed into a dark forest,

And the right path appeared not anywhere.”

Also this year, I started a newer translation, by Mary Jo Bang. It’s wordier, with more contemporary language and references. Overall it’s audacious and invigorating, although I didn’t like the opening lines quite as much. But here they are for comparison:

“Stopped mid-motion in the middle

Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky —

Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.”

Science Writing

“In the fullness of time all that lives will die.”

That’s the opening line of physicist Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time. What I think makes it particularly poignant is that, pretty soon, you realize that he’s talking not just about himself, and you, the reader, and everyone both of you know, but about the very spark of consciousness in the universe, whether on this planet or any others that might host it.

Happy new year?

2022, and Beyond!

That’s it for Range Widely for this year. This newsletter started as an experiment back in September, and I’ve enjoyed writing it. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading. The wonderfully thoughtful comments have been a very pleasant surprise.

Please feel free to leave a line you read and loved this year below. Thank you in advance, and I will read every one. And if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it.

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Thanks for helping to make 2021 rewarding, and I hope to range widely with you in 2022.

David