All right, thanks.

I think the same about the books: the content is amazing, but an excellent summary could shrink the books to a tenth of their size, and their thickness discourages me from finishing them.

And I דווקא really enjoy the lengthiness (in the books. And I’ll say even more: especially in the first two books of the quartet). The length is very necessary and really puts your mind in order. It removes necessary doubts, lays out the whole map, and shows at every point what the implications are and what the advantages are. A pleasure. In the first book I almost felt my own inner struggles gradually being unfolded throughout the book. As if the author sensed the instinctive resistance (I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said even a psychological difficulty) that the arguments provoke, and walks with you hand in hand. It was truly a wonderful feeling. The book “Two Wagons” struck me soundly on the crown of my head and told me, “Grow up” (to the third stage). And that is a hard, painful, and not at all simple process. I don’t think I could have gone through it without all the length in the book, including the side insights and digressions. [Since then I’ve felt that the author of the first book (and the second) “grew up too fast for me” in other areas as well, but maybe in the future I’ll “grow up” too—who knows?]

Surprisingly, it’s much easier for me to read this kind of lengthiness than other people’s brevity. Of course there are other kinds of long-windedness—common pedants or babblers—where the length really is impossible to get through, and with all the verbiage everything becomes blurred. Vagueness and carelessness can be covered up either by excessive brevity or by excessive length, but there is also a kind of length that sharpens and clarifies and contrasts and insists on precision.
It’s a well-known jab at the phrase “it is easy to see” in mathematical proofs: whoever uses that expression probably doesn’t know how to prove it, because if it’s easy, then write a little more and prove it. There are, however, times when using “it is easy to see” is actually necessary, because when you present a new way of looking at something, there are proofs that follow immediately, and if someone doesn’t see that it really is “easy to see,” then he hasn’t understood the basic claim. A banal example: when you look at a matrix as just an operator, who knows whether it has eigenvectors? But when you look at it as a geometric creature, you can understand without difficulty that a rotation matrix has no eigenvectors. In that sense, “it is easy to see” is an indication to the reader of whether he has correctly understood what came before. It’s an exercise for the reader, not sloppiness on the author’s part.

Everything that I, as a reader, try to do on my own when I read others who are brief, I get ready-made in the longer books, and can think directly about the claim itself. In the end it is possible to summarize every argument very briefly, but that doesn’t mean it could have been presented in that short form from the outset. The short summary rests on the length behind it. The length pours the ideas directly into the patterns I’m expecting (and sometimes also creates the patterns, based on meta-patterns I’m expecting), and that is really much more pleasant. All the difficulty remains a direct difficulty with the claims themselves, not with deciphering, mapping, and organizing.

In short, the long road is, for me, much shorter and much more pleasant.

Much appreciated.

I participated in the lecture yesterday, and I would like to respond to the speakers (“Sweet Potato,” “Nur,” and “Yekhalkelkha”—where do these names come from?).

When talking about brevity versus length, there are two different aspects. One is the question of how much time to devote to a given topic. On that question, I do not agree with “Sweet Potato.”

I had already studied the material presented yesterday in an “Introduction to Logic” course, so it was not new to me. Even so—and perhaps because of that—I felt that the amount covered was very great, and material that is usually taught and practiced over a long period was packed into a short lecture. In other words, I would not support shortening the lecture time.

There is a second issue, and that is the level of scope and density of detail. Here I would support shortening lectures / posts / articles, by omitting aspects that are not central or moving them into side notes or appendices.

The sheer length is indeed burdensome, but not because of “dragging things out,” as “Sweet Potato” wrote, but because of the Rabbi’s tendency to go into every aspect and resolve every question that comes up in the topic.