A couple of weeks ago an article in New Scientist was talking about ‘dark matter’, and how if people ever found any they’d be able to make a perpetual electricity generator that wouldn’t violating the laws of thermodynamics. To me, it makes sense that if there’s a hypothetical substance that doesn’t obey the laws of thermodynamics, this can be taken as proof that it doesn’t exist.
I was just thinking about that today because I realised that one of the things I’m trying to do here is probably also impossible. I want to try to figure out what ‘good’ writing is, but if that were possible, it wouldn’t be true any more. If everyone wrote according to a proven template of ‘good’ writing, it would instantly then become ‘average’ and therefore ‘predictable and mundane’ writing. That’s probably what’s already happened. It’s like what Douglas Adams was saying with ‘if anyone can figure out why the universe exists, it will instantly be replaced by something even more bizarre’.
This probably explains why I have so many pet hates but no pet likes. Everything I like is more or less uncategorisable, and if I could think of any definitive ‘pet likes’ I’m sure they could be applied to many things that also qualify as pet hates. I like ‘word play’, for example, but I hate puns.
January 22, 2007 at 4:15 pm |
This has nothing to do with sublimity, but CNN has a story about Grammer Girl’s Quick And Dirty Tips For Better Writing, which is an instructive site: http://grammar.qdnow.com/
December 6, 2007 at 4:33 am |
“If everyone wrote according to a proven template of ‘good’ writing, it would instantly then become ‘average’ and therefore ‘predictable and mundane’ writing.” this is true only if the definition of good writing is better than average. Such a definition leads to absurdities like good and bad writing are always being produced in roughly equal amounts, when we all know that the bad is common and the good rare.