So... Something
I've lost my taste for essays, just now
I’ve lost the taste for essays. It’s like that sometimes.
I can say what I need to say quite plainly, really. Essay-crafting isn’t about communication, it’s about hypnosis. And essay-reading is mostly about self-hypnosis.
I find it so… something, just now. Tedious, maybe. Ingrown. Not quite manipulative, but.
You want to be hypnotized into a worldview, and I want to hypnotize you into a worldview. So we do our little dance.
What’s it like to write from a place that needs nothing from you?
Can I write from a place of simply stewarding words, ideas, and feelings well?
Or something like that. Maybe I can at least edit from that place.
I was needing to be hypnotized by something that doesn’t state much, and these 429 characters did it pretty well.
As I was reading this, my mind flashed on the old, primal conflict between Socrates (or at least Plato's version of him) and the sophists, the dichotomy of plainly spoken truth versus rhetorically dressed-up persuasion, with all the baroque fancying up of language and concepts for its own sake that the latter can involve. Sounds like you're in a classically Socratic space right now.