January 30, 2020
From the aphorisms of Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort:
“All that I’ve learned I’ve forgotten; the little that I still know, I’ve guessed.”
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Marcel Proust on anticipation, from Within a Budding Grove:
“I continued to wait, alone or with Swann, and often with Gilberte, come in to keep us company. The arrival of Mme. Swann, prepared for me by all those majestic apparitions, must (so it seemed to me) be something truly immense. I strained my ears to catch the slightest sound. But one never finds quite as high as one has been expecting a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer’s leap in the air …”
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From Joe Moran’s First You Write a Sentence:
“Reality is not there to be hunted and speared with sentences. In good writing, problems are lived, not solved—are held and weighed with words, not beaten with a stick until they are tamed.”
“The word sentence comes from the Latin sentire, ‘to feel.’ A sentence must be felt, and a feeling is not the final word, but something that grows, ripens and fades like anything else that is alive. A line of words should unfold in space and time, not reveal itself all at once, for the simple reason that it cannot be read all at once. Out of this immovable fact about the sentence—it unfolds—flows every¬thing else.”
“In noun writing, anything can be claimed and nothing can be felt. No one says who did what to whom, or takes ownership or blame. Instead of saying that x is not working (verb and participle), they say that there has been a loss of functionality (two nouns) in x. The words are not even trying to illuminate; they are immunizing themselves against the world.”