The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, May 23, 2025

Notebook: It’s one of the most well-meaning but annoying flatteries: someone tells me they’re in complete agreement with a column. It stops the conversation dead. Complete agreement is as dull as it gets, and as pointless, for the same reason that I don’t think I’d have been nearly as interested–or useful–had FlaglerLive been, say, BethesdaLive, though I don’t think I could stand to live in a liberal enclave anymore. Too oppressive. Too conformist. Too sanctimonious. We have our Puritan mullahs in the South, as Mencken put it (about mullahs anywhere in the country), but it was of the north, and of Massachusetts in particular, that Hawthorne wrote of  “the persecuting spirit.” So I was in 100 percent agreement with Carlos Lozada’s January piece in The Times, his “73 Percent Solution”: “If you react to something I’ve said or written with “100 percent” — in written, oral or emoji form — all you’re telling me is that I probably did not persuade you of anything. Instead of changing your thinking, I affirmed it. “100 percent” lets me know that I’ve accomplished nothing but scratch your ideological itches, confirm your convictions, pinpoint your intellectual erogenous zones. One hundred percent — really? Even if you agreed in the main, did you find nothing at all worthy of disagreement? Not even, say 3 to 5 percent? If so, why should I bother writing, and why would you bother reading? One hundred percent agreement is a high-percentage failure.” I don’t want to say that we’ve lost the art of disagreement. I don’t like that sort of golden-age implication that something was working 10, 30, 50 years ago but isn’t now. I don’t know that we’ve ever mastered that art, which is itself heartening: we should always be pushing for something. Attaining it would be like 100 percent agreement. So we may not have lost the art of disagreement, but we’ve probably never had it, and should foster it a bit more. It’s more interesting to disagree, to argue, to debate–especially on fundamental subjects. It drives me nuts to come into a group of people for a little socializing, only to hear that politics, religion and sex are off the table. What’s left? Taylor Swift? A little less uniformity. A little more disagreement–as long as it’s the sort of disagreement that forecloses neither conversation nor mutual appreciation, otherwise–again–what’s the point? Let’s picket echo chambers and get back to arguing. We’ll live longer. We’ll be happier. 

—P.T.

 

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The prevailing style of nonfiction prose today seems quite the opposite of exploratory or experimental, is less interested in compositional challenges or literary playfulness and much more intent upon sustaining a sincere-sounding, unambiguous, straightforward documentation of largely painful personal narratives. Well and good; but one would hope that literary nonfiction would welcome a larger variety of models, a more diverse set of literary standards, an inclusion of more inventive styles. Yet except for a few prose variations—the prose poem (now often termed “lyric essay”), the mosaic or braided meditation, or the numerically segmented piece of nonfiction—it appears that the go-to handbook for most creative nonfiction writers remains Strunk and White’s fairly conventional Elements of Style and not Gertrude Stein’s audacious primer, How to Write.

–From André Aciman’s introduction to Best American Essays 2020 (2021).

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