It is wisest to write in ‘I-natural.’ But many write in ‘I-sharp.’
— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14
At first glance, Valéry seems to be recommending modesty: lower the temperature, stop preening, write from the self without making the self the whole cosmos. Sound advice, as far as it goes. But “I-natural” has its own dangers. For many of us, the natural self is not Montaigne in a dressing gown but a man in pajama pants, Crocs, and a stained T-shirt, muttering about errands while scratching himself where no guest should have to look. Rawness is not the same as honesty. The unfiltered self may be genuine, but so is bad breath. There is a kind of writing that mistakes lack of preparation for candor, as if the reader were morally obliged to sit through every undigested thought because it emerged sincerely from the author’s head. This is slovenliness with a clean conscience. The slovenly “I” forgets that anyone else has entered the room.
But Valéry’s “I-sharp” is not innocent either. The word first suggests the self pitched too high: the ordinary ego inflated into drama, portent, grievance, revelation. One did not simply go grocery shopping; one passed through the fluorescent nave of late capitalism and beheld, among the bananas, the spiritual exhaustion of the West. But “sharp” also points in the other direction. Couldn’t we say there is a good sharpness? A sharp-dressed man has not necessarily falsified himself. He has made himself presentable. Likewise, a writer may dress his thoughts for company without becoming a fraud. Indeed, it can seem rude not to. To invite the reader into one’s “natural” thoughts without arranging them first is less a confession than a breach of hospitality. Style, at its best, is not vanity but consideration: the combed sentence, polished syntax, and offered chair of prose. The trouble begins when style stops serving the guest and becomes the host’s mirror. The sharp writer remembers he has an audience, but too often he wants that audience staring at the cut of his coat.
The real “I-natural,” then, may not be the naked self at all, but the socialized self: the self that has acquired tact. Some sport a romantic suspicion of manners, as if every rule of civilization were an enemy of truth, and every unfiltered impulse carried the authority of a mountain spring. Yet good manners are a kind of contrived naturalness. Children have to be taught not to interrupt, not to monopolize, not to announce every whim as it passes through them. Small talk, so often despised as empty, is one of civilization’s little mercies. We ask about the weather not because we are amateur meteorologists, but because weather gives two strangers a neutral patch of common ground on which to stand until conversation can move under its own power. Writing has similar courtesies: proportion, clarity, pacing, restraint, an occasional joke placed where the reader might need one. These artifices do not betray naturalness; they create it. The slovenly writer says, “Here I am; endure me.” The sharp writer says, “Here I am; admire me.” The natural writer says, “Come in; I’ve made a path.”