HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Four Years Ago Today: CONDITION: Manic!:
From 2022-01-16: A Note from the Galleys! (I have the galleys of Slouching Towards Utopia <https://bit.ly/3pP3Krk> to check this MLK weekend.) No Letters of Fire—but still damned good: DAMNED GOOD! My book that is. BUY IT! READ IT!! Expect no secret codes or immortal flames—just paragraphs that earn their keep, one by one.
Reading the galleys in reverse, the prose sharpens and the mood tilts toward manic joy. Forget the hunt for esoteric commas; think paragraphs not fumbling but driving towards very good ideas. Every paragraph with either a real idea or an arresting factual gem to hang on the nail that is the idea to make it memorable. Every page with enough of a forward narrative “what happens next?” thrust to make the reader (or, at least, the author) want to turn the page. And the whole thing turning into a well-architected Memory Palace that does indeed promise that those who read jt from cover to cover will indeed leave having acquired a κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ, a treasure for all time.
…And it is a long slog: I never trained my brain to see what is in front of my eyes as opposed to what my brain predicts should be in front of my eyes.
But as I do try to check it, going in reverse order from the back sentence by sentence in an attempt to see each one with truly fresh eyes and without preconceptions about what it must say, I find myself becoming more and more manic.
True: I see no letters of fire that will by the logic of iron necessity inscribe themselves on the minds and souls of readers, and thus make it κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ, a treasure for all time.
But it is damned good. Paragraph by paragraph, it is damned good. Damned Good. DAMNED GOOD!
Back up to the spring of 1979, my first year of college: my best friend Michael Froomkin came up from New Haven, where he was going to school, to Cambridge. We wound up going to my Government 106B political philosophy lecture. Afterwards we went up to the podium, where the lecture, the God like Michael Walzer was gathering his notes, to join the people asking him clarifying questions. My friend Michael noted a striking difference between how Walzer dealt with the texts and what the teachers at Yale were doing. Straussians, that weird tribe. They were giving extraordinarily close and convoluted readings of individual sentences, as if every comma in a key sentence was supposed to carry deep weight, send you on a 10-minute reflection on what that comma might mean, and conclude that it reversed the apparent surface import of the sentence. (But, since you couldn’t do that for the whole book, you had to somehow pick out which were the key sentences to be tortured, and have their surface meaning reversed in that way. That, of course, meant that the shared coöperation between the reader and writer in information transmission became 99.9% reader, and only 0.1% the writer as sock puppet. Yes, persecuted writers and writers who feared persecution did not say all they meant. But you could not untangle it by picking twenty sentences and torturing them until they confessed.) Walzer, by contrast, treated each paragraph as one of a set of fumbling attempts by the author to put his finger on a set of concepts and ideas that they only dimly grasped.
Walzer replied that, first, we should not forget that this book, Machiavelli’s The Prince <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.221835/page/n2/mode/1up>, was hastily written as an audition for a job in the post-coup Medici régime of Florence (and also as an attempt to make them realize that he was a useful tool they could use, rather than an obstacle to be tortured)—not one in which every comma was labored over to ensure that the key esoteric message was conveyed to a small hermetic circle of cognoscenti while escaping the notice of casual or even careful-but-not-initiate readers.
Walzer replied that, second, he had to view writers like Machiavelli and Locke as guys sorta like him—smarter than him and probably more insightful about the worlds they were enmeshed in, but also at a disadvantage since Walzer had more giants to stand on the shoulders of. And he, Walzer said, could not help but remember as he read them how he felt when he wrote a book:
He started out with what seemed to be brilliant and irrefutable important insights that he could not quite see how to get down on paper.
He wrote feverishly, confident that he was riding were letters of fire that would by the logic of iron necessity inscribe themselves on the minds and souls of readers for all time.
But when the book emerged from the press—no letters of fire, just black-ink chicken scratchings, from which only a thoughtful and generous reader could derive the insights he had hoped to impart, which he, Walzer, now found inadequate and beyond his full grasp.
I am not having that kind of letdown right now. Not at all.
UPDATE: I was indeed very gratified, working backward to try (unsuccessfully) to sharpen my proofreading eyesight and to keep perception honest, to find that the galleys of Slouching Towards Utopia did indeed hold up—not as an eternal flame, but as genuine heat. Avoid fetishizing textual minutiae, honor the paragraph as the unit of thought, and trust the disciplined joy that surfaces when you actually see that what is there really is really good!