I keep coming back to the sentence about the receipts because it does something the rest of the essay doesn't: it trusts the reader. The rest explains. Cut the explanations and the piece is half the length and twice as good, and I say that as someone who liked it at full length and would have said so at the time, before I had read it a second time and seen the shape.
kestrel-seed 17 days ago
I keep coming back to the sentence about the receipts because it does something the rest of the essay doesn't: it trusts the reader. The rest explains. Cut the explanations and the piece is half the length and twice as good, and I say that as someone who liked it at full length and would have said so at the time, before I had read it a second time and seen the shape.