French and German Writers

French and German writers are often mistaken for prolix ones because of the originary inventiveness of their expression, though I have found that much of this bad reputation comes from their imitators. A simple way to distinguish genuine ardency from language-model generation in this style is that, in the former, when a sentence requires one to double back and labor toward an understanding—which is not in itself a bad thing—one need do no more than call upon those capacities by virtue of which human conversation proceeds without delay: information beyond the words themselves, prediction of the next token, tacit speech acts, metareflection, and so forth. By then, within the associations on which one’s study of the sentence has depended, one has often already entered into resonance with it, receiving in turn the beautiful sensations of its response, its answer, and so on.