Advice For Writers

“I don’t know whether I was a budding universal philosopher, but I did commit the sin of wanting to be a multifold heretic within the scope of a single paragraph, or sentence. I’ve tried to stop doing that.”

If someone ever makes fortune cookies for philosophers, this should be the insert for every single one.

Oddly enough, I was just given a version of this advice (that is, to avoid parenthetical asides :-)) in the comments thread to my future generations post.

John (if I may), you certainly have no worry about writer’s block now. That was the most precise excision of the cancer of self-possessed philosophical writing I’ve ever read.

@geo — amen.

Kenny @7, the trick (for me) in parsing that one was to read “involved” as roughly “tangled” — the F.R. is being said to have mixed morality up in certain evils.

@7, 11, 14

The sentence and I get along just fine until “yet saved…” After that, though I can understand it, I get the unshakable feeling that something has gone terribly wrong, either in the sentence itself or between my chair and my keyboard.

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

That, all by itself (though I might wholly misunderstand it) is worth the price of admission.

And this as a no-cost extra (remember my definition of extra.)
Rhetoric, after all, has always been about making the worse case defeat the better.

Gentlemen, you have truly made my night.

Cheers!
JzB

Wilfred may be thinking of the sermon in the Portrait:

Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended.

Warning to all but the most hardened atheistical scoffers: don’t read the sermon in the Portrait. It will give you nightmares.

@John #17:

From “Portrait” – don’t have the book in front of me but it’s the scene where Stephen’s priest explains what eternity is: Imagine a fly landing on the earth once every million years, and the earth is made of solid iron, etc.

Yes I googled “Joyce priest fly landing iron earth” in various combinations and couldn’t find it.

Sounds suspiciously similar to a kalpa: every quadrillion years an angel (let us say) brushes the smallest, lightest, most insubstantial feather on its wing for a fraction of a second on a mountain of adamant (remember my definition of adamant) bigger than the earth, and when that brushing finally wears down the mountain yadda yadda yadda (which you wholly misunderstand).

Rhetoric, after all, has always been about making the worse case defeat the better.

I thought rhetoric has always been about how to manipulating people into feeling either more guilty or less guilty for being who they are. (Or for wanting what they want, doing what they do, feeling how they feel, whatever.) Not always favoring the worse case, but certainly something you’d expect to see perfected by an entity taking a predominant interest in contouring what you feel guilty about…

Pedantry: Pretty sure the ‘if’ is a standin for ‘which was’ rather than ‘although’ — unless we’re talking about hostile elements, which seems out of place in a sentence that’s not about D&D. (Of course, the sentence elegantly mistakes no fewer than eleven words (element, religion, if, hostile, art, yet, save, movement, involve, morality, and French), which kind of sets a land speed record for wrecks per metre.)

But I like gratuitous parenthetical asides (albeit normally using em-dashes rather than parentheses, which however tend to do terrible things to formatting on Crooked Timber).

Alas, on the interwebs you’re screwed. Should you fail to explain every reference and clear up every ambiguity, then one of our resident trolls will get the wrong end of the stick, object energetically, call you a moron, and run off with the thread.

Any ordinary leader-writer (let us say) might write swiftly and smoothly something like this: “The element of religion in the Puritan rebellion, if hostile to art, yet saved the movement from some of the evils in which the French Revolution involved morality.”

Indeed they might.

THE SUN SAYS: The element of religion in the Puritan rebellion, if hostile to art, yet saved the movement from some of the evils in which the French Revolution involved morality.

Good for the Puritans!

I remember reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at 18, and glanced at it again this year.

Sam @37 Really? is the whole of the work amusing for you, or just specific parts? Because of a sort of gaucheness on the narrator’s part? Or something else?

“April 13 That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us. Damn him one way or the other!
April 14 John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west of Ireland. European and Asiatic papers please copy. He told us he met an old man there in a mountain cabin. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English. Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man sat, listened, smoked, spat. Then said:
– Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world.
I fear him. I fear his red-rimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till day come, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till…Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean no harm.”

I love this quote, John–thanks for it. I really ought to read some Chesterton. Among other things, he apparently understood why I was a bad blogger. “The very forest of the man’s thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare,” etc.

Plus, if there are any kids reading, they shouldn’t be allowed to think it’s a good idea to put butter on a burn.

#28 – I see garymar has found something similar.

By coincidence, Unfogged this morning points us to Adorno’s 1956 essay “Punctuation Marks” which includes this passage:

The test of a writer’s sensitivity in punctuating is the way he handles parenthetical material. The cautious writer will tend to place that material between dashes and not in round brackets [i.e., what is commonly called parentheses, ( )], for brackets take the parenthesis completely out of the sentence, creating enclaves, as it were, whereas nothing in good prose should be unnecessary to the overall structure.

Warning to all but the most hardened atheistical scoffers…

Keep this handy as a ready antidote.

[Reminds me of New Yorker story years ago about long-distance ocean swimmer, when asked if she ever thought about how deep the water underneath her was while swimming she answered, “Don’t talk about that.”]

Joyce of course stole the sermon in Portrait and did not make it up. I forget the particulars but he lifted it.

Thers, in that sense, no one has ever made anything up. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

“A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.”

That’s a great point, and exactly how I try to do economics. I stick to orthodoxy in methodology so that I can be heterodox in terms of analysis and policy. I can think of plenty of examples going the other way.

I’m annoyed by all these approximations to eternity, because they all convey the impression that eternity is an unimaginably long time, implying that some nearly interminable process could bring it into perspective, which it can’t. It’s simply endless.

However, I just wanted to share an excerpt from a posthumous work by J.B.S. Haldane which I just ran across:

My rectum is a serious loss to me,
But I’ve a very neat colostomy,

“A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.”

I thought of economics too – in particular some discussions of it here at CT – and reflected that Catholicism, being essentially conservative, is not amenable to the paradigm shift.

Chesterton seems to be talking of qualifications and caveats, which are left out at the author’s peril, and not digressions, which should be brutally suppressed. (I thank CT in general for helping me – not that anyone else would probably notice – to learn to do the latter, at least, to some extent, at least. Peter Hitchens is one who can’t resist (further) narrowing his audience by littering everything he wrotes with irrelevant and idiosyncratic – yet insistent – asides. All his arguments are ab homine.)

It reminds me of reading Heidegger, except he never bothered to repeat the explanations for all his idiosyncratic terms.

Ajay @41: “teeth will be provided.”

Honestly, if anyone really truly believed in that vision of hell, they would never ever ever do anything even vaguely wrong. Ever.

Although, suddenly the evangelical earnestness makes sense – if you’re going to that hell no matter what, since no one can possibly be perfect, fling yourself on the mercy of the sadistic b*stard who thought it up, and tell him daily how much you love him – be the perfect masochist – if that’s the only way to escape.

And thanks to David Duffy for that (which I had to google) – I can just hear him saying it too…