Style

A personal account of how style develops, and a back-of-the-envelope survey of how style encourages, soothes and thwarts us.

Style is delicate. It’s a kind of trance created by the things done and undone, the ways in which they’re completed or left hanging. To talk about it too much is to put my own trance at risk.

Style versus taste

Taste is what you like and don’t like. Combined with certainty, it has the power to move others, or to be a terrible prison (see “Personal Cinematic Universes,” later this fall). Style is the expression of that taste. It shows up in everything you do.

Everything shapes your taste. And inversely, your style reveals everything about you - what you hate, what you think is possible, how well your digestive system is working.

But taste and style have an uneasy relationship. You may like fedoras, until you see one on your head. You may like a sentiments, until you hear it coming out of your mouth.

When starting this ongoing essay project more than a year ago, I had a sense of how to proceed, based on what I liked and what I didn’t. The past year has helped me see how that taste plays out in an essayistic style.

The No Homework manual of style

The dictates below are all ones I’ve violated in the past year. Maybe you can point my violations out. But I usually wrestled with the choice to do so. At the risk of demystifying my own style as an essayist, here’s what I have: