Indicate precisely what you mean to say…

The book I was reading is titled Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete, here is one excerpt:

Michael: What was [Allan] Bloom like when you first met him?

Seth: He was supersensitive to people’s defects. He had antennae out, he knew exactly…

Robert: People’s weak spots?

Seth: Oh yes, it was extraordinary.

Ronna:  You continued talking to Bloom often over the years, didn’t you?

Seth: Pretty often. But he was often was distracted. He got impatient if you could not say what you wanted to say in more than half a sentence.

Robert: The pressure of the sound bite.

Seth: I remember the last time he came. He was about to write the book and he asked me what I thought the Phaedrus was about.  I summed it up in a sentence, and it didn’t make any impressions.

Ronna: Do you remember what the sentence was?

Seth: Something about the second speech turning into the third speech, and how this was connected to the double character of the human being.  I managed to get it into one sentence, but it wasn’t something he wanted to hear.

A fun book.  For all the criticisms you hear of Straussians, the few I have known I find are quite willing to speak their actual views and state of mind very clearly and directly.