ave something to say. If one has something to say, if one has profound ideas and strong convictions, style comes naturally. Great thinkers are great stylists, and great stylists are great thinkers. Plato, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are considered models of Greek style, Danish style and German style respectively, and they’re also the deepest thinkers that those three nations have produced. Emerson is the deepest thinker that America has produced, and also America’s best prose writer. 8. Nicknames, store names, and advertising are the poetry of everyday life, and one finds in them many of the techniques that one finds in poetry. 9. Reader and Writer Reading is often a kind of friendship. The reader gets to know the author, and if he likes him, if he feels akin to him, a kind of friendship develops. (The saying “opposites attract” may apply to love, but it doesn’t apply to friendship; friendship is based on kinship, on similarity of character.) Sometimes reading leads to actual friendship, friendship between living people; Emerson and Carlyle, for example, became friends after Emerson read Carlyle’s writings. More often, however, reading leads to friendship at a distance—a distance in space or a distance in time. The writer is sometimes a father figure rather than a friend. Shakespeare was a father figure to Goethe, and Schopenhauer was a father figure to Nietzsche. When a young reader idolizes a writer, he often wants to imitate the writer, to model his whole life after the writer. The young Victor Hugo, for example, said that he wanted to be “Chateaubriand or nothing.” The young reader envies the accomplishments of the writer he admires, he wants to accomplish as much himself, and he’s discouraged when he thinks of the great distance that separates him from the writer he admires. Like a hiker setting out to climb Mt. Everest, he feels that he must work hard, and strain himself to...
