The Anatomy of Intimacy: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Perfect Sentence
How to read and write: mirroring sound and meaning
“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
Connection can happen in an instant. It's a chance meeting at a friend's place, a stray glance at a store, an offhanded swipe on an app. It's an accident that reroutes the course of your life. To "slip" is the perfect analogy: there's an ease, an unbalancing, and an inertia to real connection – a falling into that, when it's right, feels as easy as obeying gravity.
These are the people who enter your life like an event. In hindsight, such encounters seem completely obvious. Inevitable, even. It's only from a distance that the significance even registers: you'd just met a person who would be someone – who would make you someone else – in your life.
Fitzgerald was well versed in whirlwind relationships that transform lives (famously, this novel's publication convinced a young Zelda Sayre to accept his marriage proposal). And you can see it in his prose. Like all great writers, he doesn't just describe connection. He makes us feel it through the language.
"Slipped briskly into an intimacy..." This first half of the sentence, with its short vowels (those repeated "i"s) followed by crisp consonants ("p", "k", and "t"), creates quickness, energy, movement. As the characters slip into intimacy, your eye similarly slips across the words.
"…from which they never recovered." For the second half, he slows everything down. He transitions to longer open vowels in "from" and "recovered." The repeated "r" sounds bunch at the back of your throat, forcing a small pause.
He’s sonically mirroring the shift from brisk movement to the slower, longer realization of permanent consequence.
Fitzgerald was operating on multiple planes. In sound, rhythm, and structure, the sentence performs the emotional journey it describes. This is why that line sticks in your brain. He’s hitting you from multiple angles without you being fully aware of it.