`Concentrated and Nutty'

I favor a style simultaneously forthright and reticent, giving while withholding. This tension energizes sentences and keeps readers moving along, while never discouraging us from pausing to reread and savor. Rereading is commonly thought of as consuming a book once consumed, but good writers encourage us to reread phrases, sentences, paragraphs and more as we move through a book the first time or the fourth. There ought to be no unintentional vagueness, affectation, confusion, padding or euphemism. Say it once, say it squarely but don’t tell us everything you know. This is a common failing among bloggers, who lack nuance and a sense of play in their prose. Their sins are impatience and earnestness, resulting in a shotgun approach to discourse. Thoreau identified this failing in the work of Thomas De Quincey. In an Aug. 22, 1851, journal entry he writes:

“It is the fault of some excellent writers – De Quincey’s first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me – that they express themselves with too great fullness and detail. They give the most faithful, natural, and lifelike account of their sensations, mental and physical, but they lack moderation and sententiousness. They do not affect us by an ineffectual earnestness and a reserve of meaning, like a stutterer; they say all they mean. Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new, impression; sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman aqueduct; to frame these, that is the art of writing.”

Of course, most bloggers, most writers generally, are untroubled by the absence of art in their prose. Among newspaper editors of my acquaintance, there was an understanding that well-written copy (artful but not pretentious), sentences that transcend subject-verb-object, that play a bit with irony, that hint rather than holler, are suspiciously effete. Thoreau continues in his journal:

“Sentences which are expensive, towards which so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across; which contain the seed of other sentences, not mere repetition, but creation; which a man might sell his grounds and castles to build. If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed on, it would have been far more excellent writing. His style is nowhere kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting.”

A frequent writer of diamonds in the blogosphere is Nige, proprietor of Nigeness. His posts are brief and usually erected around some everyday event. Last Friday, Nige saw a butterfly and called his post “On Paying Attention.” He could have turned his observations into self-congratulatory nature swooning, Instead, he considered the significance of being able to identify what we see – with the caveat that over-reliance on identification can turn into yet another human cul-de-sac. He even pulls off the extra-human feat of usefully and accurately citing an episode in A la recherche du temps perdu:

“There's a famous passage in Proust, where the narrator, anxious about his grandmother, races to Paris to see her. When he arrives, she is not expecting him and he witnesses, as it were, his own absence. In that absence, what he sees, shockingly, is not his grandmother but a florid-faced, mad old woman, sitting in a chair reading. Momentarily, he has not identified her, in the act of loving attention in which she is, not that mad old woman, but his beloved grandmother. Loving (ideally) attention is what makes us what we are - what, in every sense, distinguishes us - and without it, as King Lear demonstrates with horrific vividness, we are no more than bare forked animals.”

Read the entire post to appreciate how casually and without portentousness Nige leads us to his conclusion. His writing is, to use Thoreau’s words, “concentrated and nutty.” He doesn’t throw everything at us, and what he throws is generally worth catching.

Another blogger worthy of attention is elberry, who tends The Lumber Room (“flotsam and jetsam from a broken world”). Like Nige, one of his pals, he’s English, and on Sunday he gave us his version of that venerable form, the travelogue: “Oxford.” He’s acerbic, notices details and is consistently funny. What does elberry read while visiting the ancient university town?:

“i find a copy of Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable trilogy for £3 and read it in various dens, pubs, cafes and restaurants escaping from the rain. Sample glories from Molloy:

“`The more things resist me the more rabid I get. With time, and nothing but my teeth and nails, I would rage up from the bowels of the earth to its crust, knowing full well I had nothing to gain. And when I had no more teeth, no more nails, I would dig through the rock with my bones.’”

There’s a fine companion, grumbling about ugly Americans, reading the great trilogy, posting a picture of the most savory breakfast I’ve seen in decades, and quoting Theodore Dalrymple with approval. Despite Thoreau on De Quincey, the English seem to do some things better.