This blog, for example, frequently finds it tempting to insert literary allusions in its posts as an attempt to convince its imaginary audience of its author's erudition. Such posts might include quotes like the one below(by Karen Blixen, also known as Isak Dinesen) to make a point that may or may not be orthogonal to the semantics of the passage itself.
and you, Marcus, have given me many things; now I shall give you this good advice. Be many people. Give up the game of being always Marcus Cocoza. You have worried too much about Marcus Cocoza, so that you have been really his slave and prisoner. You have not done anything without first considering how it would affect Marcus Cocoza's happiness and prestige. You were always much afraid that Marcus might do a stupid thing, or be bored. What would it really have mattered? All over the world people are doing stupid things... I should like you to be easy, your little heart to be light again. You must from now, be more than one, many people, as many as you can think of.
The gratuitous and (in the opinion of this blog's, at least) gauche display of soi-disant learnedness serves only to communicate the author's inability to explain the thrust of his argument by more direct means. By deferring to an authority higher than himself, the author displays an intellectual timidity that no degree of literary knowledge, however eclectic, can allay.
It is this blog's humble thesis, therefore, that overt references to works of literature be abandoned in essays that seek to divulge the motivations of an argument.
PS: An attempt to write in a more Nabokovian style.
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