He wrote remarks

 One of the things I like about Wittgenstein was that his writings are in the form of remarks. He wrote remarks.

That sounds odd because we don’t think of remarks as a literary form, although we occasionally come close when talking about aphorisms. But an aphorism seems to me to be a polished thing, while a remark is a quick observation made in the heat of an investigation.

I’ll admit that I’ve never heard a crowd clamoring for the recognition of the remark as a literary form. But I did run across this from W.H. Auden:

 

A poem must be a closed system, but there is something, in my opinion, lifeless, even false, in systematic criticism. In going over my critical pieces, I have reduced them, when possible, to sets of notes because, as a reader, I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.

 

It’s remarkable to me that Auden rewrote critical essays into the form of “sets of notes,” which I’d call remarks. I think it was a good call. But I think the remark is a literary form.

• Source: W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand; New York: Vintage International, 1989, p. xii. For an earlier note on the same idea, see “The remark as a literary form,” July 4, 2022.