Spectator No. 476 - Method gives Light

Joseph Addison did make me chuckle, despite having to copy his essay into word and change all the stupid uppercase-for-noun that I guess was fashionable at the time. But the man does have a point, which after all the reading we've done is probably more relevant to us than it would have been 3 months ago, and his point is this: pearls of wisdom are better when they're strung together, rather than garbled down on the page like a stream of conciousness. Accessible work is memorable work.





He likens the (lack of) method from some minds of geniuses to men he overhears in the ye-olde equivilent of a Costa Coffee, saying that once the meaning of the question has been lost that men generally resort to flowery wording: "Our disputants put me in mind of the Cuttle-fish, that when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens all the Water about him till he becomes invisible." He couldn't be more right. Who hasn't tried to win an argument before by attempting to sound sharper and more informed than the other, whether or not this has any actual foundation in reality? When in doubt, use unneccessarily long words and attack the other's use of grammar.


I'd like to think that I was more of a Will Dry - someone who tries to win arguments logically - but when it comes down to it I'm more likely one of those "who admires Tom Puzzle." Tom Puzzle is described by Addison as the one prone to equivocating around the point. Oh dear.




"On the Essay Form", Addison claims that authors are forgiven repetitions and pedantry in works of a larger nature, and that to release your thoughts in the form of one or two short publications they had really better be something special, lest they get lost amongst the sea of other unoriginal prose. This is simply due to the fact that we "do not expect to meet with any thing in a bulky Volume" - we know its going to be hard going extracting those pearls of wisdom from a book the size of a telephone directory, but in something much shorter, you expect it to be conversely more to the point. Maybe this is all very tongue in cheek, but I can't help but agree.


He's rather complimentary about people who might cast aside his own literature, saying that "There is a kind of Heaviness and Ignorance that hangs upon the Minds of ordinary Men, which is too thick for Knowledge to break through." Wonderful. His analogy of blind moles to ignorant men wouldn't be as bad if he didn't describe moles as vermin, which is the first point I've got to disagree with Addison on.

Less of the hatred.