Flowery writing isn’t always bad writing: for instance…
Jul 31, 2024
(This article is Part-6 in a series; for Part-5, go here.)
Guess what?
The Declaration of Independence is a string of jewels.
I don’t know how many times I’ve read it. But this time, it hit me harder.
Try writing flowery for a whole page and see if you can keep the ball rolling, the river flowing, the reader from laying his head down on the table and dozing off.
It isn’t easy.
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Before I print out the Declaration’s opening salvo, here are a few phrases to watch for—they make the brain sparkle:
WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS. My boat pushes off from the shore. I want to move along with that course.
DISSOLVE THE POLITICAL BANDS. I just like it. The dissolving, the disappearing, the disintegrating. The bands are gone.
THEY SHOULD DECLARE THE CAUSES WHICH IMPEL THEM. Yes, they should. This phrase tells me we’re not fooling around. We’re going to get the particulars. The reasons.
From WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS all the way to AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS—that’s a gorgeous river. I’m in it in my boat.
These and other phrases keep you THERE. Moving. This is elevated writing.
I’ve struggled through reading a significant amount of 18th and 19th century high-flying rhetoric. It wanders and clears its throat often. It tries to inflate itself. It chatters like monkeys. The Declaration of Independence is very different:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world…
Bravo.
How many times did you have to stop and wonder what the authors were saying? None. Right?
They kept you in motion.
Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, two other writers on the Committee. And who knows, maybe, just maybe, Tom Paine in the back room. Don’t I hear his voice here?
If so, all bets are off. Because Paine was a singular writer. When he got down to business—the business of inspiration and logic in magic collaboration—he was unmatched.
He invented America in his mind, AND sold it to the people—not as a commercial product.
As POETRY.
— Jon Rappoport
Postscript:
This week is WRITERS’ week here at my Substack.
I’m posting pieces about writing… because I just endured listening to Biden’s “farewell address” from the Oval Office.
The language…the clichés…the 1950 7th grade patriotic generalities strung wall to wall…the forced non-human elocution of Biden, as if he were a barely functioning machine…the “heroism” couched in lollipop lingo…
Horrific.
And yet I know that for many viewers, his speech was a success! It resonated! They are lit up. My God.
Kamala and Trump also have their “language problems.” Incessant drumbeats repeating the same sentiments over and over. Swarming generalities. Fishing for reflex responses from their audiences. The Mechanical posing as Life. Grotesque.
THIS is where authentic literacy sinks to its knees and begins to weep.
The unknown authors of the King James would go out into a dark alley and scream.
Poets like Fitzgerald and Whitman and Dylan Thomas would go deeper into their whiskey and try to blot out what they just heard.
A vast formidable intellectual—Teddy Roosevelt—would march into the Oval and toss Biden out into the Rose Garden.
I’ve never heard such an execrable performance from a sitting President.
And so…I dedicate this week to WRITERS and WRITING. I have to.
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