Thinking in Prose

Two sorts of prose give me the most sublime pleasure: the concise and aphoristic, and the elegantly discursive. I thought of this Sunday while rereading Guy Davenport’s translations of Heraclitus – a perfect example of the first category, and by that I refer to both the axioms of Herakleitos, as Davenport transliterates the philosopher’s name, and Davenport’s own prose. Such sentences are experience or thought distilled to dynamic essence. There’s no padding, no fat. The result is at once dense and light, like good bread or a well-made omelet. A useful aphorism anticipates its own repudiation. It is sturdy, timeless, self-protective, cocky. It dares you to disagree. Here are several Heraclitus fragments as rendered by Davenport:

“Eyes are better informers than ears.”

“Change alone is unchanging.”

“It must be seen clearly that war is the natural state of man. Justice is contention. Through contention all things come to be.”

“If everything were smoke, all perception would be by smell.”

The last sample is so evocative, so impacted with thought and observation, it anticipates Darwin in 10 words and by 1,800 years. Of Heraclitus’ best-known utterance, Davenport writes in his introduction:

“In Fragment 69 I have departed from literalness and accepted the elegant paraphrase of Novalis, `Character is fate.’ The Greek says that ethos is man’s daimon: the moral climate of a man’s cultural complex (strictly, his psychological weather) is what we mean when we say daimon, or guardian angel. As the daimons inspire and guide, character is the cooperation between psyche and daimon. The daimon has foresight, the psyche is blind and timebound. A thousand things happen to us daily which we sidestep or so not even notice. We follow the events which we are characteristically predisposed to cooperate with, designing what happens to us: character is fate.”

Reading such prose with care and attentiveness – a life’s work -- is a lasting education.

The elegantly discursive mode I associate with the rambling, digressive, improvisatory, leisurely, conversational strategies of Montaigne, Sterne, Hazlitt and Proust. Less conspicuously crafted than the aphoristic mode, such prose is more difficult to write well, because it invites self-indulgence. It is not long-winded or arbitrary. It is not “spontaneous Bop prosody,” as Allen Ginsberg idiotically phrased it. Here is Hazlitt in his essay “On Reason and Imagination”:

“I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even wore than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea. There are those (even among philosophers) who, deeming that all truth is contained within certain outlines and common topics, if you proceed to add colour or relief from individuality, protest against the use of rhetoric as an illogical thing; and if you drop a hint of pleasure or pain as ever entering into `this breathing world,’ raise a prodigious outcry against all appeals to the passions.”

You can't change or elide a syllable in that passage, though Heraclitus might have made the same point in six or seven words. Hazlitt is no blowhard, and nothing he writes is puff. His medium, as surely as Heraclitus’, is his message. Some writers, of course, straddle both modes – Thoreau, for instance, and Beckett. The best prose is a way of thinking and is its own reward.