The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader by Borges

The destitute condition of our letters – to wit, its inability to seduce readers – has engendered a superstition regarding style, a distracted interpretation by the partially attentive. What those afflicted with this superstition understand by style is not a page’s efficacy or inefficacy, but the ostensible habits of the writer: his similes, his sound, the occurrences of his punctuation and his syntax. They remain indifferent, however, to his convictions or his emotion; instead they seek out tecniquerías (a word coined by Unamuno), “games of technique,” which will tell them whether or not what is written has the right to please them.

Note: The Selected Non-Fictions (ed. Eliot Weinberger) uses a translation by Suzanne Jill Levine which is clearer overall, but I prefer this translation, whose final paragraph is very beautiful:

Now I wish to remember the future and not the past. […] I re-read these negations and think: I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.