I'm playing devil's advocate again.  This comes, like the last one, from Passive Voice who cites the Opinionator.  In this case I agree.  I like the sentence he cites very much indeed.  It contains everything the glance out of the window has conveyed to the observer.

 

"I cannot help but marvel at Angela Carter’s crammed sentences and how, for all their weight and violent grandeur, they sustain a kind of perpetual motion. Take this single line from “Nights at the Circus” where Carter gives us the startling view from a trans-Siberian train:

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky."

 

 

 

 

 

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;)

This reminds me of last year when I tried to rewrite Tolstoy.

Thanks for being provocative again, I.J.  The sentence would work for me if the writer had put a period after the word "water."  The last clause pushes it over the top.  It's too much.

Well, the land is flat and vast, so a puddle reflects the entire sky.  But, more importantly, it gets the vastness of the sky into it.

When I lived in Texas, I was told repeatedly about the immense and gorgeous skies over Texas.  Living in Virginia, one sees only patches of blue between tree branches.  :)

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