Writing that was supposed to be great

(This article is Part-8 in a series; for Part-7, go here.)

I don’t know about you, but my education was blocked when I tried to read “vital writers” whose style was so abstract and dense, I needed crutches and an attending nurse in the aftermath.

On the other hand, here is writing I was told was great—and it was. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, 1849:

“The line, broken into moving fragments by the ground, went calmly on through fields and woods. The youth looked at the men nearest him, and saw, for the most part, expressions of deep interest, as if they were investigating something that had fascinated them. One or two stepped with overvaliant airs as if they were already plunged into war. Others walked as upon thin ice. The greater part of the untested men appeared quiet and absorbed. They were going to look at war, the red animal—war, the blood-swollen god. And they were deeply engrossed in this march.”

“At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.”

“He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.”

“It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled…He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies…”

This writing MEANS SOMETHING. You have to take it and the writer seriously.