Methodical Banality

The Renaissance scholar and educator Erasmus of Rotterdam opens his polemical treatise The Ciceronian (1528) by describing the utterly dysfunctional writing process of a character named Nosoponus. The Ciceronian is structured as a dialogue, with two mature writers, Bulephorus and Hypologus, trying to talk Nosoponus out of his paralysing obsession with stylistic perfection. Nosoponus explains that it would take him weeks of fruitless writing and rewriting to produce a casual letter in which he asks a friend to return some borrowed books. He says that writing requires such intense concentration that he can do it only at night, when no one else is awake to distract him, and even then his perfectionism is so intense that a single sentence becomes a full night’s work. Nosoponus goes over what he’s written again and again, but remains so dissatisfied with the quality of his language that eventually he just gives up. Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam Writing (1523) by Hans Holbein. Courtesy t ... Read full article.