A Scholar’s Lament
written after a long hiatus (I was studying Latin)
As I write this, 36 hours have passed since initially waking up, and of them I have seen 24 in full. As a result, there comes some slowness of mind, some deprivation of spirit, and even some fruitful melancholy, but on the whole I am indubitably happy. An overwhelming joy comes upon me, enlightens me with the gift of insight, and leaves without asking anything in return. I merely become the conduit of something I cannot comprehend.
In comprehending, there be many fickle paths that lead some to clarity or deeper confusion, of which those with right mind, good method, or luck hit upon the instant illumination, whereas those less fortunate stagnate for days, months, years—all with deep hopes that their confusion ends, all the while their suffering ignorance prolongs their anguish—but in this experience there be much to gloat about. To find, alas, what you were after is amongst the greatest of fortunes life can bestow upon man.
The sense of mental liberation is something that cannot be understated, for scholars and thinkers alike search, but few truly find, and even fewer turn such insights into further gains. While millennia have passed, and man's knowledge has increased exponentially, we still bear the stamps of our lowly origin. All too clearly is this shown when man is asked to ruminate upon something he has never considered. Watch as he prattles off the most asinine nonsense ever spouted, and, with confidence, has the nerve to emphasize and aspirate his periods as if he has just spoken the final truth ever to be uttered.
It is only in thinking that cogitations have any effect upon the will at all. To what end would he be performing his mental acrobatics if he were to conclude that it was all for naught, or simply to pass the time, or was done without a desire to burrow deeper into the depths of his soul? In thinking, what was once mere appearances and vague notions becomes solid realities, true ideas which to further probe for the sake of finding deeper things.
It is natural to be ignorant, but beastly to desire only a state of ignorance. What good comes of finding that you know nothing, are incompetent in everything, desire only fooleries, and engage in idle diversions of little benefit or of no lofty status? Nothing. Only those who, first, recognize their inadequacies and, second, desire such a change, can begin the process of illumination. Illumination does not come upon those who wait, but those who actively court it, want it, above all else.
"Ignorance of certain subjects is a great part of wisdom," said Grotius, and so too is intelligence on those things that you deem worthy of pursuing. The capable mind should be free to wander to and fro, and actively combat what their passions are. They must acquire a foundation in the thing if all is to flow smoothly from the beginning.
He who neglects the fundamentals suffers at the hands of the experienced. Even the brightest geniuses pale in comparison with the technical masters. Precocity alone isn't enough to rely on consistently. One must be willing to break away from conformity only after everything the herd takes as final has been absorbed and understood.
Often, burnout ensues as a result of pushing the precocious young one too far in a single discipline, rather than allowing them the freedom needed to explore various things unencumbered, which is the natural course the mind usually takes. In exploring new subjects, one must have great patience, for a mind too quick in apprehension often confuses itself by trying to solve what it perceives as a problem which may or may not be already addressed the further one studies it. Take a subject as far as the material lets you, but once you feel you have surpassed it, and understood it completely, you are free to allow the mind to play and wander with the material obtained.
All genius is intuitive. It comprehends itself by its own self-evidence. The truest sparks of creativity are those born like embers from a steel mill.
The blacksmith has his hammer, blowtorch, and anvil, while the aesthetical man, literary man, free spirit, or wandering soul has his own mind and genius—for the sake of finding various geneses within the comfort of his own soul. Whole epics play out in our mind unconsciously, and so we must become like the sage or ancient bard, interpreting these things without much forethought, or care for consistency, or even standards. One must forget everything they know, and toss aside every long-paved tradition, for the sake of hitting upon what their heart is truly after.
It would be folly to lament your own stupidity when you have within your power the ability to change that. It matters little what your aptitude is, only that you comprehend your own person. Know thyself has been the prevailing precept of wisdom since the dawn of civilization, and for good reason. One cannot begin understanding what they undertake unless they first ask themselves why they do so, and what part of them is found within such pursuits, and whether their time is nobly spent is grieving over it. Ignorance, essentially, pervades all things, and is the source of all misgivings, failures, and misguided actions. With so much knowledge accumulated over eons, every second making a mockery of us, one would think the deepest regret a person could have is not spending enough time rectifying their gaps in education, or not pursuing those things which provide for the wanton, gratify the vain, or embolden the timid—but no, no such regret is ever considered, let alone reflected upon actively. Great deeds are only becoming when done for their own sakes. A man is not made better simply because he wishes to do great things: he must embody himself in all things, consider above all his own advice, and afford no compromises to those who try to dissuade him.
Life is, today at least, too often swamped by coteries and false dichotomies—by people who only seek agreement. The days of engagement with differing views are gone.
It's not that they can't entertain hypotheticals, or comprehend their own faults in reasoning, but simply that they don't want to. The echo chamber they reside in is too comforting to them. They have drawn on it to the point of reliance, and suddenly find themselves weak in the presence of new ideas that disagree with what they already subscribe to. You can tell an independent mind from a mere pundit with a high verbal IQ by their ability to engage with what they disagree with. While the pundit only looks through the lens of their own expertise, and therefore always has the most myopic views on things—while also feeling the need to actively refute everything that they perceive as wrong—the independent mind, like the philosopher, fears nothing—relying on their confidence and steadfast commitment to what is true to guide them. In short, one is guided by a commitment to not be wrong, while the other only seeks to understand what is potentially true.
People today get the false impression that they’re correct simply because they could defend what they believe as true, when in reality, a defense alone is not enough to prove the veracity of something. A lawyer may defend their client eloquently, all the while knowing they are guilty, for the sake of convincing the judge. But this is no path to truth—rather, it is the path of sophistry. From this, one can debate what truth is (which I don't intend to here) and come upon various definitions, some of which may provide validation for their worldview, but which offer no real framework or methodology for actually discovering what really is true. The problem today is that everyone defends a label, rather than an idea on its own, which they erroneously wrap up with their identity, and so, an attack on their idea becomes an attack on them. Until this stupidity ends, the herd will constantly find themselves at odds with each other. Peace has all throughout time been earnestly desired, but always fell short from ignorance alone.
All of human error could be represented by a donkey and a fly: one whizzes around the other for no other reason than to agitate, and as a result consistently gets swiped at by a tail. In today’s age, let the fly be truth and the donkey tail willful ignorance. With this image set up, one clearly sees before them the genius of my analogy: truth agitates and becomes enviable as a result of the power it yields, and willful ignorance is nothing more than a vain attempt to place on equal ground fiction with fact. When the fiction trumps fact, you know something is messed up internally, either with the culture or with the people in general. To go the rest of your days happy with being wrong is something I personally cannot stand by, and so must express my displeasure by writing and fighting this battle endlessly.
After all, the best writing is often that which is expressed in a colloquial manner, comprehensible to even the stupid, has elegant rhythm, flawless in presentation and reasoning, and lastly—most importantly of all—simply gives what the author thinks as true in a way that gratifies the intellect of the reader without being too tedious, prolix, or boring.
The writer is nothing more than a stenographer of culture. They display what the literarily inclined know by intuition, what the literati know by second-hand account, and what the masses know by experience but fail to articulate. Nothing is more venerable than an individual who resembles Schopenhauer, Plato, or Bacon in approach to composition. Brevity with purple drapery. To say nothing of those men who never shun brevity, but nonetheless have a high word count: for their every idea either tangents into another—as with Montaigne, Emerson, and Hazlitt—they know too much—as with Dr. Johnson, Browne, Milton, and Addison—or they contain so much passion that they rhapsody into a frenzy of paragraphs at an astonishing rate, displaying their whole soul—as with Carlyle, Nietzsche, Goethe, or Laurence Sterne.
Man alone is to decide what to focus on in composition, while the public is to decide the fate of the author. How many know Shakespeare yet do not read him? What of Jane Austen, the Brontë Sisters, and George Eliot? People know of these geniuses, but never actually decide for themselves to read them unless they are inclined to or forced to in some wretched English class. One may read for enjoyment, employment, or idleness, but the best reader is one who reads with the intention of liberating themselves from the world, the endless chain of depravity, and seeks only to expand their capacity to empathize and comprehend expression and humanity at large.
Literature is never solitary, but rather is a constant interaction with the unconscious influences of experience and society. What man writes is not what man thinks, but is what man has found provoking enough to give posterity. Sentences have their own shelf time, and as a result take on a life of their own once published for the world to see. What is great today is shunned as antiquated and regressive tomorrow. Immortality is only found within authors who express humanity, depth, and insight in even their passing reflections. To be ranked amongst the greatest is nothing more than the recognition that you have expressed in the language of your century what shall be true for all centuries hence.
Writers are made by two things: experience and depression. I truly believe that a kind of unending internal monologue must always accompany a writer—for the basis of all writing is found in the recognition of some sharp sensation that causes one to pick up a stone, stick, stylus, pen, or keyboard, and write down what it is they have received. While I type out all this babble, I do so with the hope that at least one will find something useful in these unending meditations—most of which afford me no material gain, but infinite mental pleasure. I know I am made the happiest man alive by the perusal of my own thoughts.
Fortunate is he who finds nothing but insight, pleasure, and contentment within the recesses of his own mind. No greater good can come than from knowing what is and isn't kosher for your soul. You are yourself and nobody else. Is there not the greatest potential in life? A journey for the sake of growth, of endurance, of struggle, of power, etc. Such is why I find literature the greatest of all things: my inclination towards the profoundest thoughts and considerations from people of all ages accumulates into a kind of chronological recognition of ancient and modern wisdom alike, all of which make way for my own inspiration and profundity. All this said thus defines the literary man.
The literary man, however, must also be a kind of hermit, a misanthrope towards the world. He must do everything in his power to stop all distractions, and place himself in such an environment that allows him to engage with his mind alone, outside of any perturbing influences. The mind when first awoken is like a finely tuned instrument, ready to make clear what yesterday was obscure. As one progresses through the day, however, and is forced to encounter the feckless, stupid, nearly infinite multitude—most of whom are ignorant of any noble literary emoluments—their mind becomes unintentionally corrupted by virtue of proximity to these beasts of burden. It doesn't help that one acquires a perfect knowledge of their debasing diminutives of speech if they be young enough—an overthrow of proper elocution—the result of which stems from cultural trends with regards to education, and which spoil what is already the trite garbage we have come upon while fighting that endless wave of linguistic drift.
The Flynn effect would have it that mankind is gradually improving in intelligence as innovations in quality of life occur, ignoring the fact that such an effect is a statistical anomaly, rather than definitive proof of societal improvement. Literacy rates are enough to overthrow that notion.
But to return to literature, men are marred by critics and remembered by the public for no other reason than that their ideas are a good representation, or approximation, of the collective will of the society he inhabits. Truly I ask, how many writers are remembered on account of their ideas alone? Some have so many that they are remembered on account of their prolific output, like Erasmus, Cardano, Dumas, or Balzac. Some are remembered on account of a single good idea, like Locke, Hobbes, or Grotius. And then some, a very select few in fact, combine prolific output with incomparable genius: Da Vinci, Thomas Young, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Shakespeare, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Cicero.
If one cannot be both a genius and pontificator, then choose the genius. Genius is felt across time, while the pontificator is quickly forgotten, only recalled in scorn, probably in some scathing literary review which few read and fewer recall, the kind of thing that would only be interesting to a historian or biographer. Personally, while I live, my efforts are only given on those things which either give me pleasure or increase my genius and experience. Until the hand of death presses me beneath the dust, and I lose all sanity or willingness to keep up the confabulation of life, I shall always have enough heart to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune for the sake of my art, or for humanity at large.
They say one must either laugh or cry when presented with the realities of life, but I prefer to treat life as Schopenhauer or Cioran did: nothing more than a vain flicker of consciousness, held together in large part by suffering, played upon a nearly infinite stage, with only a handful in attendance. We maintain our masks, all for what? Since when did the human race collectively agree to forgo life for the sake of mere survival, all pursuits done for no other end than filling our bellies and keeping a roof over our heads. This is not real life!
Real life is the acquisition of happiness through the pursuit of it, without worry of some overarching system or autocrat dictating how we are to make our way through it. We are not placed on this Earth to merely provide profit, but to provide enjoyment and fulfillment for the rest of our fellow Homo sapiens. What kind of life would it be if all you encountered was the sufferings of a Sisyphus, Ixion, or Tantalus? Who could ever forget the sufferings of Prometheus:—O, dear god, all scholars are doomed to suffer his fate for sure. To freely give knowledge to the masses is worthy of eternal punishment, for when the whole polis is able to think for themselves, those in power suddenly feel redundant and replaceable, worthless even. It was rightly said by Hamilton in Federalist No. 51 that,
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary.
But mankind as a whole is no angel, far from it in fact. We have dominated the entire planet without batting an eye at the suffering we placed upon other organisms, to say nothing of what we have done to ourselves throughout history. History be nothing more than a litany of depravity, conquest, subjugation, and repetition ad nauseam of ridiculous suppositions, arguments, and slight offences which boil over into world conflicts. No one is safe from danger, and it’s a shock we all don't grow insane or end it all in violent fashion seeing how much we must encounter, endure without question, put up with, and take in full for no other reason than the status quo.
I didn't turn myself into the greatest writer of my generation, maybe my century, merely to rant in extemporal fashion about the vanity of existence. I had wished upon offering hope, to provide a chrestomathy of inspiration and much-needed sound judgement and right reason in an age as backward and confused as ours, but it seems I am condemned to repeat all my sentences.
When one contemplates the grand scheme of the universe, and realizes that death and nothingness meet every hopeful breath with troubling truths, it’s not hard to see why nihilism is nearly universal among my coevals. It's rather simple actually: life has no meaning, and objective truth is but perspectivism constructed only to provide syllogisms to all of life's problems—as if life could be boiled down to deduction alone.
This writing you read before you is but an aspect of life. A part of me is forever imparted to my dear reader’s consciousness, and the effect I have on them with my words is proportional to how similar our perspectives and experiences are. This is why I can read a single page of Hamlet, Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, La Nouvelle Héloïse, or Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and instantly feel connected with the author who penned such masterpieces—for in those books is about the best abstraction of human existence one can get in literature, not counting excellently written autobiographies—like those of Augustine’s, Rousseau’s, Franklin’s, Cellini’s, and Cardano’s.
I hope the collective writings I leave behind are enough to satisfy all of humanity, and provide nothing else than a clear picture of what my life was like—mundane, no action, boring by most standards, but fruitful, enjoyable, and intriguing nonetheless. But, like Nietzsche, I'm unfortunately doomed with the art of clairvoyance. My future is sealed; it was long ago. I'm to toil forever until I die, without any recognition, no inheritance to leave behind, and without love from any of my loved ones. I must, like Nietzsche, merely survive for the sake of my art. Every fiber and sinew must be turned towards the fulfillment of such a goal. Such goals are so grand they are bound to fail. Yes, they will certainly fail. Genius is either overshadowed by greater genius or ignored by the masses for being too challenging or counter to the norm. It's more becoming to forgo yourself for the sake of conformity.
But nothing kills creativity and the will to live like a pointless existence. At that point, why live at all? Prolonged suffering is only useful insofar as it is learned from, preferably with the goal of spreading ways of handling the experience so others do not have to suffer similarly. My obsession with literature was born out of my need for consolation in times when I thought death was better than life. Depression is a very visceral thing, and is as stubborn as it is persistent, lurking around every corner preying on your downfall. It erects chapels with the express purpose of destroying them should you find yourself happy. I always hated how the natural inclination when faced with despair is to rationalize it in destructive ways. You begin justifying pure insanity for the sake of holding onto some semblance of your own. We all have some form of Stockholm syndrome with respect to our own manufactured anxiety and sadness.
All of life's troubles could be the result of ignorance, as the Buddhists think, or that we haven't hardened ourselves towards the comforts of life, as the Stoics think, or that we strayed too far from the path of virtue, as Aristotle thought, or that our will desires more than we can possibly attain, as Schopenhauer thought, or was the result of an imbalance with our four humors, as Galen and Hippocrates thought—but all these men are wrong in their own ways. I think it's a mix of them all.
I never had the desire to rationalize or justify all of life. I only ever wanted to read the writings of great minds with the pragmatic goal of forgetting the suffering I was forced to endure without my consent in the real world. I suppose all scholars have their reasons, but mine were pretty straightforward—here was my thought process: "Wow, life is humbling me and it really hurts, a lot actually. I wonder if I'm worthy of life if this is how I feel regarding what in reality is a triviality."
One must feel useless to the world before they discover what they bring to it. All depression is either born out of a sense of helplessness or meaninglessness. On the one hand, you have the vulnerable ones: forgotten and ignored since childhood, or perhaps abused in unspeakable ways, failing to develop any lasting friendships or meaningful relationships; most of the time feeling utterly incompetent at conveying their ideas with any coherence or consistency. And then you have the know-it-alls, the ones who read a few philosophers whose names they can't even pronounce correctly, and find that they agree with nihilism, that all is pointless and meaningless for x, y, or z—forgetting that nihilism doesn't entail that one can't have meaning in life, only that one cannot say it has implicit meaning. I feel for such people, because I was such a man 10 years ago—not only thinking ill on myself in all aspects of character and manner, but also failing to find any love or passion by which to channel all that rage; so much pent-up energy had no release aside from worthless outlets such as video games, TV, YouTube, or pure idleness—doing absolutely nothing but loafing in bed, sulking and bemoaning my wretched fate, thinking to myself I got it the worst out of anyone in the whole world. "No one in all of history has suffered as much as I have," I once said to myself while staring at my blue wall while lying in bed. I was so anguished by what I didn't have, I was blind to what I did have. I had not known myself then, what I wanted or what I really enjoyed for its own sake, and I didn't know how to obtain enlightenment, and I think that's the most difficult aspect of it to swallow: that I was unable to avail myself of any plan or method by which to achieve happiness, aside from the diversions I created on the basis of how good they were at allowing me to ignore my suffering. I wasn't facing it, I was running from it like a coward.
Since then, I have found that the only true path to happiness in life is to discover yourself: find who you are, what you stand for, what you love about life, etc. Ask yourself how you'd fall in love with those things you did in the first place. Who were your influences? What effect did your parents have on you? What about friends? Have you tried new experiences? Have you read any good books recently? The number of paths that could potentially lead to enlightenment are nearly infinite, for there are as many paths as there are people. The hardest thing about it is simply discovering all those aspects of your existence through trial and error, all the while being forced to still put up with everyday occurrences in life. Life is brutal, unrelentingly so, and like time, it waits for no one. It's easier to put yourself in a hole than to get out of it, and so it becomes doubly important to set yourself on the right path early, for with age comes more burdens than in youth, and responsibilities multiply beyond what you could have ever conceived as a child. You must find yourself a routine, a modus operandi, by which to approach various hurdles that are undoubtedly to come as you age. This is where parents are an invaluable asset, but, suppose you have none, or you hate them—fear not, for one need only recognize the absurdity of life, as Camus did, and continue to play anyway. You see, life isn't about being successful at everything you do, as public school would have you believe, but rather enduring the worst of it for the sake of acquiring the better, and leveraging each experience with the end of advantage in mind. Everything I'm proud of in my life was acquired not on account of my genius, strength, or good looks, but rather my ability to endure everything I hate in life. I sought to, in every instant, derive some utility from every adversity. I hated life because I hated confronting the worst parts of myself, but I grew to love life by enduring life.
The only salvation I ever really needed was faith in myself. All this I speak of, all my obvious wisdom and profundity, was not acquired overnight, but through labor, toil, much perspicacity, and recognition of everything I thought worthy of my attention. As I aged, and experienced more, I took on new thought processes, new ways of viewing the world, new approaches to old problems, old approaches to new problems, teaching myself all that I had considered worthwhile but never actually pursued in school, for I didn't have the intellectual maturity to appreciate them at such a young age.
Some are forced to mature early, some never mature at all, and some don't live long enough to know what the concept of maturity is. Life is more fragile than people realize, and the sooner everyone wakes up to that dictum of Plato's that you should,
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.
the sooner humanity as a whole wins. Just imagine a world where everyone actually followed Jesus when he said love thy neighbor as thyself. To be kind, considerate, compassionate, empathetic, and the rest of the noble qualities human beings can show towards each other. It would be a radical wake-up to all those nihilists who think the point of life is to accept its sufferings without showing any signs of resistance.
Life is presented as this zero-sum game where all is divided by the winners and losers, and if you're a loser then you're somehow a failure beneath recognition, but this is not my view of life. I desire life above all things: aesthetical apprehension, grand plans, veneration of ancients, and all things conducive to a state of being that heightens every aspect of life that makes me adore it. What could be more profitable and pleasurable to existence than constant improvement and awareness of all the good fortunes that come with being alive? Life itself is a rather strange anomaly when you consider how cold and dead the universe as a whole really is. It's staggering!
I may seem like a hopeful person, who writes with fire and brimstone, but, as I said before, this was not native to me:—everything I'm praised for was the result of my own initiative. Every passion, love, enjoyment, and thing taken not for granted but duly appreciated by me, was made real to me, because I was able to relate it back to my own being, my soul, my very essence. There is nothing I don't love in life that I don't also value. Everything I do is something which I couldn't live without. The things I pursue I couldn't see continuing life if deprived of. In that sense, I make everything valuable to me by ensuring that I do it and do it well.
All this said could simply be summarized as such: find what gives your life meaning, and never stop until that thing becomes entwined with your very existence, to the point that departing from it would cause world-altering changes.
Seek, seek, seek, seek, seek, seek! And never stop until you have acquired that taste of life, that passion for it. There is an unending source of willpower within man, as Dostoevsky discovered while enduring his prison sentence in Siberia. As Beethoven discovered only after going deaf; Christ almighty, to think he composed the 3rd symphony while going deaf, and composed the 9th (the most romantic and powerful song ever composed) while not being able to hear a single note of it.
The stronger the will, the more fight typically put up by the individual. Nothing beats romantic fervor. The palpable impulse which sings, and which can be heard from the high mountains to the mole huts. I look upon the sky, with clouds slowly passing, intermixed with green from the top of trees which partly obstruct my view; and in that moment I find no greater reason to live than in simply experiencing the blue sky, the white cloud, the green tree, all which play off of each other and make each other glorious. Just as octaves harmonize to produce a beautiful sound, so too does nature with the soul. Such is life!
Life is of such a nature that mastery of it seems like a joke even to the most reasonable adults, but I'm here to say otherwise. Often does a mind, with newly acquired information, seek to make it tangible to all things that in some way relate to past experience. By subjecting life to relation and comparison, you necessarily expose all things that it is like and not like at once. At once does one cut through the fluff, and receive only what is noble to the soul, or not, depending on who is doing the interpreting. All life is but the relation of things that are similar in concept to other things nearly alike to it. It is extremely joyous to spot a pattern or similarity. To spot something in the foliage that resembles food, or to discover that what you thought was a beast was really just a strange-looking bush. Ahh, the primal instinct for survival makes itself obvious everywhere we look, and how often we do so, and spot it as such—plain and raw, unfiltered and as it is.
The imagination allows for more variability in the pleasures of life than we give it credit for. Often can the most mundane aspects of life be expressed in such a way that give them color, flavor, and passion—a kind of improvement upon the normal interpretations of our very representations. I praise higher the one who can actively engage me with the passing of his common and boring day than the one who has to travel around the world and expose himself to the most stimulating sensations in order to tell me something worthwhile. While experience is good, it is perfected when made common and possible for all to feel alike; better yet, lived in the very moment of being told as music so easily does. I would venture to say it doesn't require any particular genius, or a treasure trove of memorized quotations and maxims from history's greatest sages, to be considered profound—it simply requires patience and skill in style. The art of writing is to make words dance across the page, and swirl around the mind.
What could be said in a sentence should be. "Hold thy tongue" is a maxim told to young children for a reason. Since children lack any filter when it comes to their thoughts, they have no qualms saying one foolish thing after another, but this behavior is unbecoming of an adult. To listen and burden your ears more often with the words of others is better than saying one foolish thing because you felt the need to opine on something your heart wasn't in. Never force yourself to give your opinion on anything you haven't studied or seriously considered; silence is better than meaningless words.
On the question of style generally, Erasmus said best that style should only ever conform to the idea you wish to convey. Anything outside of brevity and lucidity often lends itself to a little affectation, and thus the writer conceals what he really wishes to provide the reader with only after a slew of useless clauses that were written merely for their own sake, rather than with the intent of making his ideas clearer. Schopenhauer, too, tells us that only ideas taken directly out of the author's mind are worth reading; as well as stressing the importance of plain prose over deliberately ornate sentences. It was common in Schopenhauer's day, the era of the realist writers, to have entire books centered around deliberately obfuscating the plot; that is to say, to provide the basis of a story, but instead of actually progressing the narrative, to become bogged down in the ancillary details of side plots and innocuous events. The goal in that era was more or less to provide a vivid, symbolic, illustrative prose style that focused heavily on minor details to give the effect of making the novel seem closer to reality, to the way things were actually experienced in the world. In short, novels with great imagery, but little substance.
And while I criticize the realist writers for getting too easily lost in the clouds of their own imagined scenarios, their prose style is undeniably unique in the history of literature. Never before, or since, have people written merely to provide the reader with a clear representation of life as experienced. It is for this reason that their prose, while anything but brief, and at times narcoleptic, is undeniably beautiful—in the sense that they often leave nothing to the imagination of the reader, often going for half a page, sometimes more, in the most polished and evocative descriptions of mundane things one could conceive. As one would likely deduce, the realist approach to prose is employed liberally by those who either have nothing to say or too much to say. On the one hand, the person is making grand what really is commonplace and boring, and on the other the person is relating what actually occurred to the best of their ability. Those who write a page of commentary for a single sentence (those who have nothing to say) should stop this practice immediately. You should leave the reader with your thoughts, rather than the ginned-up images of your thoughts. Such vivid descriptions are good practice for writing setting, or when you have to write about your own daily experiences, but it shouldn't be the sole focus of the writing, ever. Writing for the sake of titillating the brain is pointless in the age of the smartphone. Stick to writing for the sake of advancing your ideas in an honest and elegant manner and you should come out okay in the end.
But is not writing vividly not writing elegantly? I would say no. You don't need to write with lots of imagery in mind to still be entertaining as a writer. When I was struggling to find my own voice as a writer, the biggest problem I had was balancing elegance with brevity. I couldn't understand why this was a false dichotomy. I had assumed that elegance and brevity were opposites of the same coin, and that if you chose to write in one you cannot write in the other. This is wrong in every possible way. You can write with only brevity and clarity in mind, but to ignore elegance or evocative prose is to turn your writing from gold to brass; and to write only with elegance in mind is to turn your paper into a canvas, in which certain things have varying degrees of appropriateness. Overall, the writer should consult their heart first before writing a single word. To do this ensures that what you write is thoroughly yours, and beyond fault in presentation. Nothing is ever wrong when drawn out of personal experience, and every writer who claims to follow a set path for composition is either lying or writes in a stultified manner, where the mold is cast without receiving any impression from the object in question. Prose is only the servant to your ideas, you are the master. And if you are to command it well, you must first understand what it is you yourself think on a matter; all else is folly. There are those who discover what they think in the act of writing, while others know beforehand and merely work it out on paper. Whichever one you are, stick to it only up until the point that you feel you could take it no further. From that point either ditch it and try a new style or develop your own style. That much is all that needs be said on writing, nothing more, nothing less.