'You Can Oversell the Sea, Say'

“Plutarch would rather have us applaud his judgement than his knowledge; he prefers to leave us not satiated but still hungry for more. He knew that even on the greatest subjects too much can be said, and that Alexandridas was right to reproach the man who made an excellent speech before the Ephors [magistrates, overseers], but was too long-winded. ‘Stranger,’ he said, ‘what you say is right, but you are saying it in the wrong way.’” 

Brevity and concision of expression, knowing when to be quiet, is probably the chief virtue in written and spoken language. Excess verbiage suggests muddled thinking and/or monomania (Fidel Castro Syndrome). Word count is often inversely proportional to quality and richness of thought. The Gettysburg Address has 271 words.

 

The passage above is taken from Montaigne’s essay “On the Education of Children” (trans. J.M. Cohen, 1958). In the Summer 2016 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review, Kay Ryan published a poem with a title, “Even on the Greatest Subjects Too Much Can Be Said,” from Montaigne’s essay:

 

“You can oversell

the sea, say, or

the way we miss

the dead. The littlest

bit of absence excites

oceans. And of oceans

the less said the

better: the wet beyond

the land: we have a

built-in hair-trigger

primed to understand.”

 

Ryan’s terse, well-constructed verse embodies Montaigne’s advice. Like J.V. Cunningham’s and Samuel Menashe’s, few of her poems  can be further reduced. Ryan trusts her readers enough to keep it short. We can fill in the blanks: “we have a / built-in hair-trigger / primed to understand.” This sentence by Montaigne immediately follows the ones quoted above: “Men that have thin bodies stuff them out with padding; those whose substance is slender puff it out with words.”

 

With Seneca and Tacitus, Plutarch is the writer most often cited in the Essays. In his introduction to the 1983 North Point Press edition of Montaigne’s Travel Journal (collected in Every Force Evolves a Form, 1987), Guy Davenport writes:

 

“We all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at peace with ourselves, is sanity itself. The surest teachers of such reflection, certainly the wittiest and most forgiving, are Plutarch and Montaigne.”