GOOD PROSE IS NEARLY BULLET PROOF

 A good page of prose remains invincible, or so says one of my favorite writers John Cheever, but invincible against what? Not against how generations interpret the words long after the sentences were crafted in proper rhythmic order and committed to a blank page. What was once comedic and relevant to easing dread and frustration can be seen later as cruel and idiotic, worse, old fashioned. What was dramatic, tragic or moving in one era can be abstract and incoherent the following. It's only been centuries of professional explainers that have saved Shakespeare's reputation as an endlessly relevant bard by creating whole theoretical fictions that provide strained analogs with timeless human conditions ; they attempt to make his language clear and obvious and make the reader feel less than bright if they need explanations as to how the Bard's freighted references are current, concise and precisely what the universe requires. A fiction defending another fiction that on its own would otherwise be incomprehensible and quaintly creaking in cadence and candor. All the while the day outside the walls one finds themselves behind carries on, if that's the term, with its own agenda, which is no agenda at all, which is to say that its entirely raw phenomena , happenstance that comes with no atlas or tourbook.