The key to good writing is simple clarity
I have no intention of speaking like a holy prophet, as an abstruse oracle, like an apocalyptic visionary or the she-ass of Balaam beholding the angel. Nor will I discourse as if I were exhilarated by Bacchus or swollen with wind by the sluttish Parnassian muses, nor like a Sibyl impregnated by Phoebus, nor like a prognostic Cassandra, nor as if Apollonian rapture had seized me from my toenails to the hair on my head, nor like the seer illuminated in the oracle or Delphic tripod, nor like wise Oedipus, probed in the riddles of the Sphinx, nor as a Solomon before the enigmas of the queen of Sheba, nor like Calchas,interpreter for the Olympian council, nor as a Merlin possessed, nor as one emerged from the cave of Trophonius. Instead, I will speak in common, vulgar language, like a man who has had other things on his mind than to go about distilling the juice of his brain and cerebellum to the point of withering his pia mater and dura mater. What I mean is that I will talk as one who has no wits but his own, and to whom not even the garden- or kitchen-variety gods among the celestial court condescend to cast a straw, though they heap their favours ad infinitum even on their horses – those gods, I say, that ordinarily show themselves more intimate, more familiar and congenial with us. I mean Bacchus, or the drunk mounted on the ass, or Pan, or Vertumnus, or Faunus, or Priapus: the ones who neither drink ambrosia nor taste nectar (unappreciative of nymphs and pure water), but quench their thirst at the bottom of the barrel with sour wines.
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