Emerson's paragraphs

After years of having the book on my wish list at a certain web site that used to mostly sell books, I have begun working my way through Emerson's essays, starting with "Self-Reliance," published in 1841. For someone of our age, it is rough going, heavy-handed and tendentious. Since I am reading it first thing in the morning I can only chew off a couple of pages at a time. Then again, it might well be that my ability to read Emerson depends less on time of day than on the weightiness of his style. 

A new consensus has been driven by Substack,* Medium* and -- worst of all -- Linkedin, that modern readers have such Liliputian attention spans that they cannot process paragraphs of lengths greater than one sentence. I've probably railed against this before. So we are endlessly buffeted by lengthy but breathless enjoinders in which sentence follows sentence set off be a paragraph break. Time was, the convention was that the one-sentence paragraph was an extreme device to be called out only when the author had something super-important to say, most often in conclusion, which would stand alone on the page in a lonely sentence.

Emerson is the opposite. His paragraphs flow on endlessly, often without apparent thematic consistency. Often bold philosophical statements, even things that have risen almost to the level of aphorism over time, are jambed in there cheek to jowl with other sentences pretending to the same status. It gets pretty exhausting.

*Not to criticize the new prose platforms which are helping writers organize and even monetize their musings. Far from all writers on them fall prey to the one-sentence paragraph disease and even those that do often have some good thoughts and are fine humans. But the style grates on me.