The right words in the right order

The rhetorical arts can be hijacked for propagandistic purposes, but, properly deployed, rhetoric is the art of making truth memorable. An example is the recent post by Anthony Esolen on the Mere Comments blog of Touchstone Magazine. Lamenting the shriveling of the notion of reason into a narrow rationalism contemptuous of anything that cannot be easily measured or easily manipulated, Esolen writes: "This 'reason' can thus tell you how to build a Gothic cathedral, but cannot even begin to tell you why you would want to."