A couple of weeks ago I read a piece from the last page of the New York Times Magazine (a great place for short, powerful essays) called “End Scene.” In it, a man recounts how, while waiting one day for the bus, he sees a driver in a passing car lose consciousness; while checking for a pulse or breathing in the driver (he can detect neither), he calls 911 and waits while emergency crews come. As soon as they arrive, they rush him off, and he never finds if the driver lives or dies.
But he feels, as we can imagine, that the event has a certain sort of gravitas–a man could have expired right in front of him, after all–and that the spot on which it occurred should be marked somehow. Then he reflects:
But if there were a mark for this one moment, there would be marks for all such moments, and the whole city would grow black with spots like the tarred chewing gum on subway platforms.And we would notice the marks as little as we do that gum.
I was struck on first read by the power of the author’s simile in the first sentence. He’s taken something that we can all visualize (because we’re familiar with the way old gum blackens and becomes embedded in the asphalt or concrete) and leveraged that into a striking image that emphasizes how common such events can be and how trivial they would become if we were to know just how common they are. Similes are sometimes maligned as being an inferior form of figurative language (although perhaps that’s just because they’re often misused or abused by inexperienced writers), but this piece showcases just how powerful they can be.
Sentence Stalking 