I don’t know. I’ll say what I think.

“Elegance” is a symptom that the structure of the text allows the text to convey lots of information, while still keeping the cognitive load from that information under control. In other words: pretty text = structured text = text that is meaningfully informative and easy to digest.

Dissecting the examples shows it.

An ice cube melts with quiet discipline, surrendering its edges before its core, shaping the drink long before flavor has a chance to speak. Even in something so small, form decides outcome.

At least for me, the second sentence sounds ugly — because the first sentence sets up a metaphor (“everything has human-like attributes”), but the second one doesn’t use it. But note how the first sentence is crammed with information: the edges of ice melt first, this is quick enough to happen before it impacts the flavour of a drink, and its consistency is akin to the behaviour of a disciplined person.

Climate change is killing people. I am upset when people die. I want polar bears to live longer.

This is not meaningless. It’s shallow — devoid of info the reader is likely to benefit from. The first sentence is such a basic and well-known truth that the reader will either say “no shit” or deny it; while the other two talk about things that don’t matter, the author’s personal attitude towards events.

Are we incapable of making mental breakthroughs if the text does not give us a hint of sophistication? Presented a meaningful topic, we should not need linguistic beauty to care. Yet we do.

Based on what I said above, I think this rhetorical question is going the wrong way. The “sophistication” / “beauty” itself doesn’t matter, but it shows something that matters (structure). The lack of such structure makes mental breakthroughs less likely.

Is tradition what binds us to painstaking formality when writing an email? If the conventions of emailing vanished overnight, would I write “wassuh Karen, may you give me an extension on the project, thanks” and hit send? Or would the lack of polish itself feel like a violation, independent of the request?

That formality would show “this is a formal conversation, thus there’s some implicit distance between you and me, and I expect this distance to be respected”; or “this is a formal conversation, I acknowledge the distance between both of us, and I’m respecting it”. It isn’t empty babble.

This essay is half self-disgust, at how easily I am seduced by beautiful nonsense, and half a complaint against a culture that mistakes elegance for truth.

Stop hating yourself, author. You’re seduced by something that actually matters.

And while the connection between elegance and truth is by no means direct, there is one.

Elegance is makeup that hides the scars of battle. // Sometimes it hides the battle entirely.

It’s the opposite: elegance is the zoom that makes you focus on the battle.

[inb4 I know I write ugly in English. Can’t genuinely say I care.]