ABSTRACT
Most people base their judgments on etiquette. Many, nevertheless, can recognize when something is good. Critics who take them at their word are grade-school pedants who do not have the slightest notion of the conventions of society. Books of aphorisms/fragments: no one ever finishes them; that's why they are always such a pleasure to reread. Bad writers rarely publish aphorisms or fragments: it would be clear at once just how much is wanting in their sense of phrase. People think that writing fragments is stingy, as if it could only come from an impoverished mind, barren and short-winded—as if fragments remained always unfinished, nostalgic for an elusive whole, as if they were the ruins of a text that never took shape. Rarer are those who can explain exactly for what reasons something good is good. Even rarer are those who, at the moment of choosing what is good, don't abandon themselves to wild intuitions, unworthy of their understanding.
