this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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Ah, I remember House of Leaves. I can't say I was particularly into the story itself, but it was an interesting experience. Very immersive book.
On the topic of complexity / richness of prose, is the value of that mainly artistic? I've always aimed to make my writing as simple and concise as possible to aid in communication. Complexity and richness seem to go against this goal.
Even if the value was only "artistic", I think that is valuable. I don't especially want to live in a world void of art.
But while concise and simple language has its place, being able to express and understand more complex constructions seems valuable. Do you want to live in a world where no one expresses themselves with more depth than "See spot. See spot run."? The world is complex and being able to communicate in different ways seems valuable. Hitting a clever sentence can be an inspiration for thinking more.
By contrast, look at 1984 and the dystopian collapsing of language. As words are removed and grammatical structures lost, it becomes harder to express some ideas.
Ironically, I don't think I'm going a great job communicating my point. Let me try again. Simplicity and sparseness have value in some places, like instruction manuals, but richer language is worthwhile in many other contexts.