josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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'They speak as though action itself in all its phases were not compatible with frustration. All action the same.'
A method for trying to understand writing like Adorno's or Nietzsche's which uses narrative structures so thoroughly:
Isolate the shortest 'story' you can find in the text, say in a sentence. Imagine one person saying it to another, as if reporting something he saw over across the way, or in another land, or when he went on a vacation; or as if reporting his history, his childhood, his family story, and so on. What would the storyteller have to know to tell this story truthfully? How would he find out about it? If the listener wasn't sure he believed the story and wanted to come to find out more about it for himself, how would he do that? If the story has trouble being believed or standing on its own, how much more would it take—how much longer a story, how much more detail? Is there anything about the source narratives which is compromised when they're transferred into the realm of everyday little stories?
(The results may be either positive or negative, but even contrasts are useful with writing like this.)