Gar Lipow wrote:
>
> In all fairness to Gould, he died before getting a chance to revise
> this. I suspect Gould shared a problems with me: I have no problem
> producing reams of stuff - which then needs to be revised drastically in
> order to be shrunk. If you ever compared one of my first drafts to one a
> final output you will notice the end result is about one fourth the
> length. I seem to remember some famous writer's apology: "I am sorry
> that this letter is long as I had not time to make it short". In
> short, when criticizing Gould's style, just remember that you are
> looking at a first draft. Look at almost anything else by him, and I
> think you will have few stylistic complaints.
That is a possible explanation. But given how good a writer Gould is, and how capable he is of making the complex clear, one might also assume that the way he wrote the passage was the best way that material could be expressed at that point in the book. A big fuss about the prose of an excerpted passage is a bit childish. And it is just bizarre to conduct an argument about the validity of the propositions in one or two pages from a lengthy book taken in isolation.
Carrol