Why do Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Goethe, and Proust persistently resurface in my thinking, decades after I first read them?
It is not nostalgia, or not only nostalgia. Each of the four solved a problem of attention that I keep encountering in my own writing, and each solved it differently enough that the four together form something like a set of coordinates.
Hemingway: What Is Left Out
The famous economy is not really about short sentences. It is about trusting the reader to supply what the prose deliberately withholds — and about knowing precisely how much can be withheld before the structure collapses.
Fitzgerald: The Cost of the Sentence
Where Hemingway subtracts, Fitzgerald spends. The lyricism is expensive and he knows it; the beauty of a Fitzgerald sentence is nearly always paid for by something the character has lost.
Goethe: The Long View
Goethe’s range — poetry, drama, novel, scientific writing — argues against the modern instinct toward specialization. He assumed that a mind formed by the sciences and a mind formed by the arts were the same mind.
The subjects vary; the habit of careful attention does not.
Proust: The Recovery of Time
Proust understood that memory is not a filing system but a physical event, arriving unbidden and out of order. Reading him is the closest prose comes to reproducing how remembering actually feels.
Taken together, the four keep returning because each one asks a question I have not finished answering.
