Facility

Use in the book

A formed language can remove the obstacles that would force a writer to search, choose and attend. In an age of bad taste, effortless writing may therefore turn into the reader’s fatigue. Sure taste and considered choice supply resistance to the torrent of available expression. The compact contrast of care with negligence identifies two very different sources of apparent ease.

Even a work well made in all its parts needs a difficult final varnish that both hides the maker’s pains and spares the reader those pains. The care–elegance–facility sequence locates the desirable result in the work, not necessarily in the worker’s experience. The file and oil metaphors reverse the expected complaint about labor: their smell betrays too little finish or vigil. Natural facility finally requires acquired difficulty through art, reflection and taste.

Places to read

1. I, p. 181, entry 4, ¶1Ease in a formed language can remove salutary obstacles.
2. I, p. 300, entry 9, ¶1The writer’s ease can become the reader’s fatigue.
3. I, p. 425, entry 2, ¶1Taste and choice create resistance to verbal abundance.
4. I, p. 435, entry 3, ¶1Care and negligence yield different kinds of ease.
5. II, p. 496, entry 2, ¶1A final varnish hides and spares the labor of making.
6. II, p. 524, entry 1, ¶1Care becomes facility through achieved elegance.
7. II, p. 755, entry 2, ¶1Natural facility must be joined to acquired difficulty.

Translation in this edition

The English translation uses facility, ease and easily in this family. Aisance in the care passage also becomes ease, but remains a neighboring French term rather than an undeclared synonym. The masculine il refers to care, not elegance. Damaged difficulty words in the final witness remain bracketed as contextual readings.