You asked me why certain eras produce a degenerate style — why the prose gets mannered, or slack, or overwrought — and I want to give you an honest answer: because the people who write it are.
This is not a judgment. It's an observation about how the inside and the outside correspond. A man whose soul is ordered and serious writes with clarity and force. A man whose soul has gone soft and ornamental writes in a way that you can only describe as — soft and ornamental. The style doesn't cause the character. The character produces the style, the way a river produces a landscape. Watch the prose long enough and you're watching the person.
Think of Maecenas — a man of genuine power and genuine human feeling, who walked through Rome in a loose, flowing robe when the occasion called for formality, who appeared at official duties in a state of studied undress, who made his eccentricity into a performance. His writing matches. The sentences slip and coil and avoid the straight line; the thoughts are real but arrive dressed in such elaborate indirection that the point nearly disappears. You could reconstruct the man from the prose without ever having met him. The looseness of the style and the looseness of the life are the same looseness.
From the soul issue our thoughts, from the soul our words, from the soul our dispositions, our expressions, and our very gait. When the soul is sound and strong, the style too is vigorous; if the soul lose its balance, down comes all the rest in ruins.
This is why I take how I write seriously — not as a matter of craft for its own sake, but as a form of self-knowledge. When I notice my sentences getting vague, I know something is vague in my thinking. When the words multiply without clarifying, I know I haven't understood what I'm trying to say. The prose is diagnostic. It tells me what I'm actually doing with my mind, which is sometimes different from what I think I'm doing.
The soul is king or tyrant, one of the two. When it's governing well — keeping watch, maintaining standards, refusing ignoble commands — everything under it functions. The thinking is clear, the words are honest, the life has a kind of coherence that runs from the large choices down to the small ones. When the soul yields to appetite and pleasure and the need to be noticed, the kingdom becomes a tyranny, and you can see it: in the choices, in the style, in the gait.
Prosperity accelerates this. When things are going well, people start attending to surfaces — the house, the table, the clothes, the words. Each refinement requires a further refinement to seem adequate; eventually you're spending enormous effort on the appearance of the life and very little on the life itself. The person who began by wanting to live well ends up wanting to seem to live well, and these are different projects that pull in opposite directions.
Here is the thought I want to leave you with, because it interrupts everything when I remember it: life is short, and we are each one person, and one person requires very little.
Look at the kitchen preparing food for a single belly. Look at the cellar of aged wine assembled for one throat. Look at the fields in Sicily and Africa cultivated to fill one stomach. The disproportion is absurd when you state it plainly. And what's true of food is true of everything else we accumulate — the opinions, the performances, the elaborate style that takes so much effort to maintain.
Take stock of yourself. Understand what you actually need. Then write, and live, from that — simply, honestly, without flourish. The rest is noise.
Still learning to trust the plain line,