The Passage by Justin Cronin

When all time ended, and the world had lost its memory, and the man that he was had receded from view like a ship sailing away, rounding the blade of the earth, with his old life locked in its hold; and when the gyring stars gazed down upon nothing, and the moon in its arc no longer remembered his name, and all that remained was the great sea of hunger on which he floated forever—still, inside him, in the deepest place, was this: one year. 

Yes. This is one sentence. One sentence to begin Chapter 15 of Cronin's post-apocalyptic novel. When I teach poetry, I tell my students that everything matters: every word, every capital letter, every mark of punctuation, every choice to use a dash instead of a comma, every choice to make a line long or short, every rhyme, every rhythm. All of these choices invest the poem with meaning. So it is with Cronin's introduction to Chapter 15. 

Our man of the moment, black-ops FBI agent Wolgast, has been confronted with a world-altering event, the specifics of you will learn when you read the first fourteen chapters. That event is not under consideration here, however, except as how it affects the narrative. The pace of the events leading up the moment is reflected in the pace of this one sentence. 

Wolgast experiences an existential confusion, a shattering of his Weltanschauung, a sense that his memories of the old world would now be of little help in the new one, a sense of abandonment, even by the moon and stars. The structure of the long sentence, which meanders, but not aimlessly, reinforces his frantic new search—"the great sea of hunger"—for his place in the world.

There is one more sentence in this opening paragraph to the chapter. The "one year" that will define his place, even as he hungers for something different: 

"The mountain and the turning of the seasons, and Amy. Amy and the Year of Zero."

Cronin, Justin. The Passage. New York: Ballantine, 2011.