This is an entire chapter of "figure out what the main ideas are", which isn't that different from what he's written gotten before.
Not a lot new here, and not a lot of new comments. I still like the idea of this book, but I still think the execution either needs to be much more developed to justify a full book or could be chopped to well under half the length.
My main quibble here is going to be his choices of examples.
1. There's a lot of Pascal. Just why? I guess everyone (in the hoity-toity classically educated world) read Pascal back then, but it just feels goofily fringe and specific.
2. He dissects things like punctuation and phrasing in The Prince. It's not like those things change in translation (I checked, the semi-colon he talks about isn't even in some translations!) Why not pick an English example?
Current plan is to finish this section (~50 more pages), and then jump to the fiction chapter of the next section. I think I'm reasonably qualified to judge someone's fiction prescriptions, so if I'm still struggling with it there, I'll probably stop and save myself the remaining pages to get to something better. I miss reading the actual classics, as opposed to stuff adjacent to them.
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