Greetings,
Some encouragement to read old writing.
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
—Michel de Montaigne
✏️ Trained in antiquity
We write far too quickly.
In the days before laptops and word processors, writing was a slow process. Painfully slow, in fact — to make even one mistake on a typewriter meant the whole page needed to be re-written.
Today, such a dawdling, inconvenient process seems unbearable. But I do feel that modern writing is missing some special ingredient, an ingredient which is grown from this patient style of writing.
In preparation for a research study, I recently assigned some readings on creativity from the scientific literature to a student of mine (yes, there is in fact scientific research on creativity). Among the selected works were some seminal works by Donald Treffinger from the 1990s on creative problem-solving1.
For young scientists (if I may), assigned readings should not be chosen for content only. They should be chosen for other reasons as well, one of them being style. Reading the works of a great writer from the past, in any genre or domain, provides rich compost that fertilizes one’s mind and writing. The choice of words — many of which have gone out of print completely in contemporary writing — is vastly superior in older works of writing. More, there are important qualities of writing that are simply not taught anymore or found in today’s works: the compositional and visual structure of the work, the variation in sentence length, the narrative arc.
It was no surprise to me that said student found the work difficult to read.
I tell this story because I think the exceptional quality of writing from the past (at least 20 years ago) is consequence of the necessarily slower process of writing.
When you can write no faster than you can think, I believe this results in a natural cadence that makes it more pleasant to read. The sentences don’t feel like artificial constructions with bland, mass-produced architecture (cough, cough, AI). The writing of old feels like a conversation with another person. It has idiosyncratic qualities that bring the writer to life — many of my colleagues and friends have such qualities in their writing, and I like that. The writing is just better.
So I guess I’ll end with a plea. Read old books and slow down your writing process. There is a price to pay, in understanding, development, and beauty, when one tries to write too quickly and dishonestly.
Slowing down will humanize your work and bring out your natural lustre.
tendit in ardua virtus
virtue strives for what is difficult
💡 Food for Thought
The truth is often hidden in plain sight.
🔗 Sunday Best
How to Read Lord of the Rings
A writer who does not read is like a musician who does not listen to music.
More than simple fantasy, Tolkien's masterpiece offers a meditation on myth, beauty, human creativity, and spiritual recovery. We explore Tolkien’s concept of sub-creation, the sacred human act of myth-making that participates in divine creativity. Drawing from Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories," we examine how the construction of Middle-earth operates like a Secondary World, governed by its own moral and metaphysical laws. We discuss mythopoesis, liturgical reading, and the power of story to renew our perception of reality, what Tolkien calls "recovery."
The Earth Is Round (p < 0.05)
By Jacob Cohen
After 4 decades of severe criticism, the ritual of null hypothesis significance testing—mechanical dichotomous decisions around a sacred 0.05 criterion—still persists. This article reviews the problems with this practice, including its near-universal misinterpretation of p as the probability that the null hypothesis is false, the misinterpretation that its complement is the probability of successful replication, and the mistaken assumption that if one rejects the null hypothesis one thereby affirms the theory that led to the test.
One of the highest forms of intelligence is knowing what your sacrifice needs to be.
—Steve Nash
See you next week!
AT
Treffinger, D. J. (1995). Creative problem solving: Overview and educational implications. Educational psychology review, 7, 301-312.
👏