Twelve years on, and at this point clearly running on fumes, I understand that it could be difficult to believe that once upon a time Domani Dave even sported custom blog ‘headers’ tailored to the subject of each new post.

Here are three from the archive.

The trouble is, I tend to torture everything I write, which is very fatiguing at this stage of my lack of ‘lust for life’, so to speak. So, now it’s back to posting other people’s compositions.

In the case of the example I’ve chosen to purloin for this post, it’s partially about excellent writing.  How depressing is that…

It closes with: “The struggle itself toward the heights,” wrote Albert Camus, “is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” 

I’m just going to go ahead and say that I cannot imagine Sisyphus happy…

ANYway, here is a lovely excerpt from an opinion piece from the Washington Post last week by George Will entitled The Pursuit of Happiness is Happiness.

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Arriving in the splendor of Grand Central Terminal, I plunked down a nickel for a New York tabloid in order to see what was going on in Gotham. This purchase of a New York Post was a life-changing event because in it I found a column by Murray Kempton.

I do not remember what his subject was that day, but his subjects generally were of secondary importance to his style, which reflected his refined mind and his penchant for understated passion, mordantly expressed. Here, for example, is a sentence from his October 1956 report on President Dwight David Eisenhower campaigning for reelection: 

‘In Miami he had walked carefully by the harsher realities, speaking some 20 feet from an airport drinking fountain labeled “Colored” and saying that the condition it represented was more amenable to solution by the hearts of men than by laws, and complimenting Florida as “typical today of what is best in America,” a verdict which might seem to some contingent on finding out what happened to the Negro snatched from the Wildwood jail Sunday.’ 

This 75-word sentence — sinewy, ironic and somewhat demanding — paid a compliment to his readers: He knew they could and would follow a winding syntactical path through a thought so obliquely expressed as to be almost merely intimated. Kempton understood that the swirling, stirring society in which Americans are immersed is constantly clamoring for their attention, plucking at their sleeves and even grabbing them by the lapels with journalism, politics, advertising and other distractions. Furthermore, Kempton knew that reading newspaper columns is an optional activity, so a writer must make the most of his ration of words. Reading a columnist’s commentary on political and cultural subjects is an acquired taste, and a minority one at that: It will be acquired only if it is pleasant, even fun. 

However, the fact that most Americans do not read newspapers, let alone the commentary columns, is actually emancipating for columnists. The kind of people who seek out written arguments are apt to bring to the written word a fund of information and opinions. Having a self-selected audience of intellectually upscale readers allows the columnist to assume that his or her readers have a reservoir of knowledge about the world. So, he can be brief … without being superficial. 

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