The Art of Writing

There’s no accounting for some things, maybe all of them, for instance, why the banking industry should target me as a likely prospect for their Harley-Davidson Visa card and send an application in the mail unless it’s because I had a Honda 70 trail bike when I was a kid or that my friend Al and I in eighth grade had big plans that when we graduated high school we would buy a couple of motorcycles and drive across the country (alas that never happened), but how would the banking industry know any of this, I suppose they could, but they should have known better than to send me such an application based on all the stuff I post on Facebook, none of it having anything to do with motorcycles or credit cards till now and only tangentially, that I’m not really a Harley guy, and that I wouldn’t even open their damn envelope, but what they couldn’t have seen coming is that before I got around to tossing the whole business in the trash I’d get distracted by something that even I don’t remember anymore what it was and the unopened envelope would wind up on a stack of bedside reading on top of which is an essay by Leo Strauss titled “Persecution and the Art of Writing” in which he says lots of interesting things none of which unless by a very long stretch of imagination has anything to do with the banking industry, things like “thoughtless people are careless readers” so “an author who wishes to address only thoughtful people has but to write in such a way that only a very careful reader can detect the meaning of that author’s book,” plus he quotes from Plato and Milton which I like despite not being the most careful of readers or writers as this sentence amply demonstrates, so maybe I’m missing something in Strauss but that’s okay and now this Harley-Davidson Visa card envelope is finally going where it belongs and maybe these unrevised lines and what’s between them right after.