Vigor, complexity and flavor

I love to look at old books for some of the same reasons botanists like to study old vegetable strains. They have not been through the often highly dubious processes of refinement that have weeded out vigor and complexity, and flavor, too, from the contemporary language of ideas.

Marilynne Robinson, "Grace and Beauty," Ploughshares

Linguist John McWhorter tells of Civil War soldiers, many of them with barely eight years of formal education, writing wordy letters, filled with (to us) challenging sentences and references to Greeks and Romans and great works of literature, to their wives, sweethearts or parents back home. That's just the way people were taught to write once upon a time, with prose full of what Marilynne Robinson terms vigor, complexity and flavor.

Today clarity and simplicity are favored by those who teach writing and most of those who read it and write it. The use of words that somebody might have to look up or cultural references that are not clear to everyone are discouraged. As I noted a few weeks ago, those who read the Bible today are more comfortable with The Message, a paraphrase by Eugene Peterson, than the King James Version. Clarity trumps grace and beauty, especially when one is in a hurry, as we all seem to be.

To be sure, one can still find writing of recent vintage that is full of vigor, complexity and flavor. Try reading Robinson's essay in its entirely, for example, or any of her novels.

Thankfully Robinson is not alone either in writing books of this type or in preferring to read them. There will always be some who would rather read Jane Austen than Danielle Steel, Charles Dickens than James Patterson, King James than Eugene Peterson.