rdn32

I’ve been wanting to write something about brevity for a while now. You know: the soul of wit, brevitas vs. copia, maxims and arrows, and all that sort of thing. I fear I may write too much whilst saying too little. Ho hum.

My immediate spur to write is this sentence, from Rich Walker’s review of “Innovation as Normal” by Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

Sonnets and haikus are a horribly restrictive way to write, but they produce brilliant gems of ideas.

I could expand on this by recalling Holger Czukay’s maxim “restriction is the mother of invention.” However, I just wanted to consider the concept of condensing a thought—the syllable limits in sonnets and haikus being an extreme case of this.

I don’t recall ever being taught to boil down thoughts to as concise a form as possible. In fact, prior to learning a certain amount about ancient Roman educational practices from reading Mary Carruther’s “The Craft of Thought” I doubt it had occurred to me that this might be a specific skill that could be explicitly practised. (Incidentally, there’s a brief review of Carruther’s book over here.)

Brevity requires the omission of irrelevant detail. This cuts down the word count, which avoids the gist and the more striking details getting lost. That’s how come it can make ideas shine more brightly.

The difficulty, of course, lies in knowing which details are irrelevant. Perhaps this is a particular difficulty for software engineers, who in their work habitually have to regard all detail as potentially important. (Computers can be very pernickety beasts, which can encourage one in becoming rather pedantic.)

I probably don’t have anything very useful to say about this, but perhaps I can illustrate the way concision can give an idea extra punch by way of an example. It comes from a conversation I had in the late 1990s with a then colleague, Eddy. His education was, I suspect, rather more classical than mine.

There are only two things I can remember about the conversation. One was the room in which it occurred. (It’s in a house I now own. Long story.) The other is Eddy’s recollection of Machiavelli’s advice on how a new prince could secure his position.

On Eddy’s telling, or rather my recollection of it, the advice was that the prince should change everything, making everything new, and so destroying all reminders of the previous regime. Moreover, Eddy said that this was one of the few places where Machiavelli showed moral disapproval, saying that rather than ruling by such means it would be better for a man to retire to the country and raise pigs.

Here’s what Machiavelli actually said, in “Discourses on the first decade of Titus Livius”, Book I, Chapter XXVI, entitled “A new Prince in a City or Province of which he has taken Possession, ought to make Everything new”:

Whosoever becomes prince of a city or State, more especially if his position be so insecure that he cannot resort to constitutional government either in the form of a republic or a monarchy, will find that the best way to preserve his princedom is to renew the whole institutions of that State; that is to say, to create new magistracies with new names, confer new powers, and employ new men, and like David when he became king, exalt the humble and depress the great, “filling the hungry with good things, and sending the rich empty away.” Moreover, he must pull down existing towns and rebuild them, removing their inhabitants from one place to another; and, in short, leave nothing in the country as he found it; so that there shall be neither rank, nor condition, nor honour, nor wealth which its possessor can refer to any but to him. And he must take example from Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander, who by means such as these, from being a petty prince became monarch of all Greece; and of whom it was written that he shifted men from province to province as a shepherd moves his flocks from one pasture to another.

These indeed are most cruel expedients, contrary not merely to every Christian, but to every civilized rule of conduct, and such as every man should shun, choosing rather to lead a private life than to be a king on terms so hurtful to mankind.

Perhaps I’m just part of a “tl;dr” generation, but I’d have to say that I prefer Eddy’s take on this. Maybe I just liked the bit about pigs.