Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst. Behind the mirror. First word of caution for authors: check every text, every fragment, and every line to see if the central motif presents itself clearly enough. Whoever wants to express something, is so carried away that they are driven along, without reflecting on such. No improvement is too small or piddling to be carried out.
Out of a hundred changes, a single one may appear trifling and pedantic; together they can raise the text to a new level. One should never stint on deletions. If several sentences seem to vary the same thought, this usually indicates several variations of something the author has not yet mastered. In that case one should select the best formulation and work on it further. The toolkit [ Technik ] of an author should include the capacity to renounce productive thoughts, so long as the construction demands it.
The wealth and energy of these latter ultimately come to benefit suppressed thoughts. Otherwise one might be accused of stinginess. Whoever wants to avoid cliches, should not restrict themselves to words, lest one falls victim to vulgar coquetry. The great French prose of the 19th century was especially sensitive to this. Individual words are seldom banal: in music, too, the single tone never wears out. The worst cliches of them all are on the contrary word-grams [ Wortverbindungen ] of the sort which Karl Kraus skewered: totally and completely, for better or for worse, planned and implemented.
For in them gurgles, as it were, the sluggish flow of stale language, precisely where the author should construct, through precision of expression, those resistances which are required wherever language emerges. This applies not just to word-grams but also to the construction of entire forms.
The jungle is no sacred grove. It is obligatory to resolve difficulties which derive solely from the comfort and ease of self-understanding. The distinction between the desire to write with a density appropriate to the depth of the object, and the temptation for the abstruse and pretentious sloppiness, is not automatic: a mistrustful insistence is always healthy. Precisely those who wish to make no concession to the stupidity of common sense must guard themselves against stylistically draping together thoughts which are themselves to be convicted of banality.
