o pioneers

"I think.” Nietzsche cast doubt on this assertion dictated by a grammatical convention that every verb must have a subject. Actually, said he, “a thought comes when ‘it’ wants to, and not when ‘I’ want it to; so that it is falsifying the fact to say that the subject ‘I’ is necessary to the verb ‘think.’” A thought, comes to the philosopher “from outside, from above or below, like events or thunderbolts heading for him.” It comes in a rush. For Nietzsche loves “a bold and exuberant intellectuality that runs presto,” and he makes fun of the savants for whom thought seems “a slow, halting activity, something like drudgery, often enough worth the sweat of the hero-savants, but nothing like that light, divine thing that is such close kin to dance and to high-spirited gaiety.” Elsewhere Nietzsche writes that the; philosopher “must not, through some false arrangement of deduction and dialectic, falsify the things and the ideas he arrived at by another route…. We should neither conceal nor corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us. The most profound and inexhaustible books will surely always have something of the aphoristic, abrupt quality of Pascal’s ‘Pensées.’”

We should not “corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us”: I find this injunction remarkable; and I notice that, beginning with ‘The Dawn,’ all the chapters in all his books are written in a single paragraph: this is so that a thought should be uttered in one single breath; so that it should be caught the way it appeared as it sped toward the philosopher, swift and dancing."

15. February 2012

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Milan Kundera in Testaments Betrayed, discussing the meaning of the various prose styles developed by Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and how technical details like paragraph structure and the use of semicolons express deeper elements of an author’s thought and purpose.

Good writing is deliberated style as much as resonant content; there should be nothing automatic, nothing inherited, nothing thoughtless. Punctuation and typeface are not incidental; indentation- and sentence-length and paragraph rhythms all matter, and all ought to be the purposive stylistic expression of authorial intent.

For whatever reason, many seem to consider such things beyond the boundaries of artistic creativity in prose, as though we are obliged to adopt the happenstance syntax of our languages. We are not, but style is not merely a matter of some radical pose, refusing to use commas or arbitrarily violating grammatical rules in a demonstrative way. Rebellion is a crutch in art.

Good prose style is simpler and harder. We must be ruthless in interrogating everything about our writing: the plain honesty of its intentions, the truth of its substance, the value of the ideas it expresses, the novelty (or at least utility) of its existence, and all its tiniest details, all its small conformities to and violations of the rules of the language, all its periods and ellipses and dashes, all the choices we make about quotation marks and italicization, all the elements few readers consciously notice but all readers register.

(via mills)