Style may have two extremities:
The first: to say as little as possible with as many words as possible.
The second: to say as much as possible with as few words as possible.
Besides, isn’t the immortal teaching of Aristotle about the middle as a virtue lying halfway between the extremities of sins applicable again (as it would be anywhere else)?
Would it be improper to claim that good style is located between excessive lapidarity (whereas the etymology of the word itself is derived from “stony”, “hard”), which for that very reason abounds in ambiguities, vagueness and “pure” nebulae that torture both readers and listeners, and the tiring and exhausting verbiage, or rather talkativeness, in whose verbal exuberance the seeds of pure thought are irreversibly lost even when these seeds were there at all?
And it is exactly here that the golden middle is emerging as the secret of good style, but how could it be found? And, besides, aren’t the language instincts capable of tapping that source? As there has never been a prescription on good style, as there is no one who might claim knowledge on how it is made, but still everyone is capable of appraising if and to what extent that style has been “made” as genuinely gauged by its impact on others, i.e. on us all.
From the very beginning of his literary career (almost half a century ago) Isaac Passi has been following an iron-clad principle of his own, namely: it is the book only that may speak about its author (if it ventures to speak at all), while the author himself should never venture to speak about himself and about his book.
Prof. Isaac Passi agreed to make an exception of this principle by sharing his thoughts with the readers of the Balkan Publishing House.