[Sethomas]

You came for critique? Okay.

Honestly, I don't pay attention to modern art prose at all. Same goes for modern poetry. I can't say anything worthwhile about what is said, but:

Verbiage. I understand that yes, my diction is arcane and highly disproportionate to my actual literacy/intelligence. I'm not going to throw out "replace x with y" because that's not a good way to help. I can tell you, however, that this would flow much better if you replaced certain words with smaller, more laconic ones. I see a problem that you take a word that conforms perfectly to the mental image you're seeking but atrociously with the sentence structure that demands it. Particularly, most of the gerunds you use along with anything ending in -ness. The most outstanding instance is "cunningness", because common parlance would allow simple "cunning" in its place. I can imagine "a sense of non-feeling" working in particular instances but this isn't really one of them (as now structured).

I'm not a 6th-grade English teacher so I'm not going to say there's an immutable rule against treating sentence fragments as complete ideas, but the "A rare creature, indeed" really clashes harsh along the general choppiness. I'd change that to "...other living organism--indeed, a rare creature."

This does get back to the idea of having a good mental thesaurus at hand in that there's this false aura about "big words". Laconic wording, as a rule, carries greater eloquence than Teutonic verbal railcars linked together. This is something that I've had to cope with a lot because much of my verbal dexterity doesn't come from heavy reading but analytical language study, hence I'm very tempted take a common word and make it bigger and more bombastic by running it through an easy linguistic algorithm. I've learned that this just doesn't work. "Big words" don't impress people; terse and obscure ones that leave an impact. Many of these seem archaic but aren't--they're just less in vogue because of syllable aficionados like my former (and lingering) self. In general, if a word takes more than maybe 1.3 seconds to pronounce in full then it belongs in a biology journal and not a personal narrative.

If you'd like to find out more about these exciting nooks of the English lexicon, I suggest heavy focus on English literature (NOT world literature in translation) from maybe 1750 to World War I at the very latest. I often spice up my speech with words I learned by reading Londonian dialect late-Middle English. The spellings are often drastically different today but many of them are still employed and instill a cool, timeless feeling.