Winnow.

As you get older, you should get impatient with showing off in literature. It is easier to settle for blazing light than to find a language for the real. Whether you are a writer or a bird-dog trainer, life should winnow the superfluous language. The real thing should become plain. You should go straight to what you know best.” Edward Said, following Theodor Adorno, calls this winnowing directness “late style,” a notion Said illustrates, in On Late Style, chiefly by discussing the late musical achievements of Beethoven, Strauss, Mozart, and others, though writers do figure in. In remarks concluding a brief analysis of the poet Constantine Cavafy, Said attempts a definition of “the prerogative of late style”: "It has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile."

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