The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and
memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all
the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only
by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to
understand -- but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing;
for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly
formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these
notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.
But life is short and information endless: nobody has time for
everything. In practice we are generally forced to choose between an
unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all. Abbreviation is a
necessary evil and the abbreviator's business is to make the best of a
job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing. He
must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. He must
learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without
ignoring too many of reality's qualifying side issues. In this way he
may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth
about almost any important subject is incompatible with brevity), but
considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths
which have always been the current coin of thought.