Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
We need editors, but too many an editor is a Besserwisser. The editorial know-it-all knows better than the author what he wants to say and how it ought to be said. At this point I hurl choice epithets.
I offer a more measured response in The Paltry Mentality of the Copy Editor.
Both Brentano and Wittgenstein advise philosophers to take their time. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80:
Der Gruss der Philosophen unter einander sollte sein: "Lass Dir Zeit!"
This is how philosophers should greet one another: "Take your time!"
A similar thought is to be found in Franz Brentano, though I have forgotten where he says this:
Wer eilt, bewegt sich nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft.
One who hurries is not proceeding on a scientific basis.
But how much time does one have? One does not know. It is later than one thinks. So get on with it!
"Take your time!" does not apply to the jotting of notes or to blogosophy. It applies to what one writes 'for the ages.'
One's best writing ought to be written 'for the ages' even if one is sure that one will not be read beyond one's time or even in one's time. The vast majority of us are mediocrities who will be lucky to end up footnotes. Don't let that bother you. Just do your level best and strive for the utmost. Do the best you can, with what you've got, for as long as you can. Then let the cards fall where they may.
Habent sua fata libelli. (Terentianus Maurus.) "Books have their fates." What their fates are is unknown to their toiling authors.
Who knows whom you will instruct, inspire, engage, enrage?
Good advice. I should take it. I am too enamored of my own formulations, which I tend to repeat. Anthony Flood, a hard-working editor who is doing some editing for me, just sent me this:
The phrase "murder your darlings" is often attributed to the English writer and critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He used a version of this expression in his 1914 lecture titled "On Style," which is part of his book "On the Art of Writing." The original quote is:
"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings."
This advice encourages writers to remove their most cherished or self-indulgent passages for the sake of overall clarity and quality in their writing. Over time, the phrase has been popularized and widely used by writers and writing instructors to emphasize the importance of being ruthless in editing and prioritizing the work's overall effectiveness over individual beloved segments.
I've said some unkind things about editors, but they do provide a check on one's vanity and self-indulgence.
Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939 (Abrams, 1982, tr. R & C Winston), p. 194:
I love this process by which each passing day is captured, not only in its impressions, but also, at least by suggestion, its intellectual direction and content as well, less for the purpose of rereading and remembering than for taking stock, reviewing, maintaining awareness, achieving perspective . . . .
I agree, although for me rereading and remembering have as much value as the taking stock, etc. There is the pleasure of writing but also that of rereading and rethinking what one has written.
As for remembering a passage such as one above, its notation allows me to pull the book off the shelf and return to the pleasurable semantic penumbra which is the quotation's context.
From The Rage and the Pride (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), pp. 23-24, emphases added:
I must say that writing is a very serious matter for me: it is not an amusement or an outlet or a relief. It is not, because I never forget that written words can do a lot of good but also a lot of evil, they can heal as much as kill. Read History and you'll see that behind every event of Good or Evil there is a piece of writing. A book, an article, a manifesto, a poem, a song. . . . So I never write rapidly, I never cast away: I am a slow writer, a cautious writer. I'm also an unappeasable writer: I do not resemble those who are always satisfied with their product as if they urinated ambrosia. Moreover I have many manias. I care for the rhythm of the phrase, for the cadence of the page, for the sound of the words: the metrics. And woe betide the assonances, the rhymes, the unwanted repetitions. For the form is important as much as the substance, the content. It is the recipient inside which the substance rests like wine inside a glass, like flour inside a jar, and managing such symbiosis at times blocks my work.
This is from a book in which Oriana speaks her mind on the events of 9/11. The passion of her ambrosial prose, the charm of her Italianate solecisms, kept me up last night. Move over Camille Paglia!
The example of William James. Excerpt:
But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct or ‘woke’ ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.
As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial interweaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.
Seemingly, no day without a 'woke' outrage. See below. Beneath refutation. There's no point in trying to engage these clowns on the plane of reason. Mock, deride, resist, and above all: ignore the A.P.'s asinine recommendations. By the way, 'asinine' is spelled exactly as I just spelled it, and not 'assinine' despite the fact that L. asinus mean ass or donkey. So if I call you a wokeass, I am saying inter alia that you are donkey-dumb, the ass being the totemic animal of the Democrat Party.
Write and speak sentences like this: "The Germans are more rule-bound than the Italians." Not only does this sentence violate the A. P. recommendation, thereby resisting willful wokester self-enstupidation, it is also offensive to the wokeassed on the ground of its being a generic statement. "One must never generalize!" But I just did, and so did you. The difference is that my generalization is true whereas yours is self-refuting. Try thinking for a change, and you just might think your way out of your wokeassery. Since I care about and you and your sanity, I recommend that you study my Substack article Generic Statements.
Well-written advice on writing well from Brand Blanshard.
A former colleague of mine published one lousy book, a teacher of mine, many.
The writer italicizes what he hopes the reader would underline were there no italicization.
Substack latest.
Much of what I post here is pretty feeble stuff. But damned if I don't love this daily scribbling!
No day without a line. But why keep a journal?
He who writes may or may not be read, but he who only reads will never be read.
A lover of language, precise in its use, respectful of its mothership* of our thoughts, analytic but not conceptually myopic, out for the Sellarsian big picture, non-dogmatic and therefore skeptical in the best sense, which is to say, an inquirer, but not a worldling mesmerized by the sublunary, and therefore spiritually oriented. And his attitude toward academic or professional philosophy? At once both respectful and critical. And similarly with respect to every institution and everything institutionalized: respectful but critical.
Where would we be without institutions? And yet they are like the houses around here: they either have termites or will get them. The right attitude: we fumigate, not demolish, edifices infested with termites. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, and the universities. And others as well.
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*A neologism, apparently, one that just occurred to me, crafted in parallel to 'fathership,' a word recognized by Merriam-Webster. And you call me a sexist? And you think conservatives are stick-in-the-muds opposed to everything new?