“I suppose,” he began, once there was a cup of tea for each of us on the cocktail table between our chairs, “that I’m writing this in my late style.” He wasn’t reading from pages, as he had before. It took me a moment to realize that he was counting on the notebook that I thought it had been my idea to bring. I started scribbling. “My very latest! I’ve never been entirely sure what late style is supposed to be. A conscious simplicity—digging a channel in the hope that its sides will contain the yaw that cognitive decay knocks into the boat? Or is it the resignation that an older artisan is likely to feel about the familiarity of his tools? The overfamiliarity. I imagine a pianist, at the end of her career, thinking, Oh, just these notes, then? There aren’t any others in the keyboard, by any chance? But it’s not notes, exactly, I don’t think, that she would be getting tired of. Any more than it would be words for a novelist. Or for a philosopher, for that matter. I think it’s more likely to be phrases, for a musician. Or ways of shaping phrases. And characteristic moves, for a philosopher. Logical and, as it were, procedural moves. Moves in the game. Maybe what’s meant by late style is that one gets tired of one’s own manner, of the little ways of solving the little problems, ways that have become so habitual they no longer feel chosen—ways of opening an inquiry, say—sidling up to it or attacking it head-on—whatever your personal predilection happens to be—and instead of finding new ways, instead of experimenting the way a young person does, you accept the familiarity, accept the simplicity of not choosing, and make an effort to attack a new problem, or maybe an old problem, of greater scope, using the old ways of solving as tools. At its best, anyway, that’s what I think late style would be.”

Caleb Crain, “Trying to Find the Right and True Way to Talk About Death Is Funny”