Yet another mind wracked on the treacherous shoals of Thucydides.

What Victor D is trying to do, consciously or otherwise, is write like Thucydides, whose sentences sometimes go on for pages. I can sympathize. For years I found it very difficult to write except in long periphrases that tried to squeeze huge chunks of reality distillation, qualifying clause after qualifying clause, into one sentence.

The first thing you learn if you try to write like that, is that it doesn’t work in English. You just have to trust your readers to have the sense to wait for whatever qualifications are needed to come out in the due course dictated by the limitations of the mother tongue.

The second thing you learn is that this style doesn’t work if you’re not Thucydides.