Friday’s free association and temporary cessation of reality—so to speak— leads to a question (in which the pandemic, the climate crisis, wildfires in California, Trump and the Republican Party, unemployment, poverty, hunger, indeed, the myriad causes and consequences of needless forms of suffering are, for a moment, out of the picture):
La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), whose maxims were refined over a number of years within the French literary salon of Madame de Sablé, * wrote “True eloquence consists in saying all that is required and only what is required.” Notice the period here is embraced by the closed quotation mark. Today it is accepted if not the manual of style preference or norm (I have not consulted the several style manuals to determine whether or not this is consensual) to place the period outside the quotation mark (similarly with commas). I find the former usage typographically (if not grammatically or linguistically) more eloquent and aesthetically appealing if only because the quote marks are curved and, as noted above, represent an embrace, as it were, of the preceding punctuation mark. Is this symptomatic of obsessive compulsive disorder (in particular and for example, “the ‘symmetry factor’ correlates highly with obsessions related to ordering, counting, and symmetry, as well as repeating compulsion”)?
* “The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld are the result of six or seven years of patient refining during which the circle of Mme de Sablé repeatedly offered its advice and criticism.” Jon Elster reminds us that Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and La Bruyère “mark the beginning and end of the greatest era in French intellectual and cultural history.”
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