So in fact you disagree. More junior professor writing that you don't have to reach up to grasp.
To give a case of an author I've discovered recently who manages just the opposite: William Ophuls. He writes on a difficult, complex, and diverse topic (political systems response to a world of limits), but does so with an economy of words, a superfluity of information, an elegance, and all while maintaining interest and engagement. I'm still mulling over what he's written at a month or two's remove, and want to re-enter it again. I picked up a great deal reading his works, Plato's Revenge and Immoderate Greatness.
That is mastery of language.
Mark's writing isn't.
Is there a distinction?
Once I read a book that was partly about the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The author included a short quotation from one of his works translated into English, which I struggled to fully grasp. The original French version had been included as a footnote, so I decided to give that a shot with my limited high school French.
With the help of a dictionary and a lot of struggle, I was finally able to understand. But going back to the translation, I couldn't find anything wrong with it. It seemed like a perfectly good interpretation. I understood because I made something hard to understand even harder, not by making it easier. Increasing the difficulty forced me to slow down and focus.
You're free to define mastery of language as writing which feels effortless to read. But in my experience, the brain is a muscle which grows by putting it under strain. It may be beautiful, but for me that kind of writing is a waste of time.
The huge personal disappointment—and it puzzled me for a long time—was that junior professors did not, by and large, give us work I wanted to print [in "n+1"]. I knew their professional work was good. These were brilliant thinkers and writers. Yet the problems I encountered ... were absolutely not those of academic stereotype ... the "inability" to address a nonacademic audience. The embarrassing truth was ... [that w]hen these brilliant people contemplated writing for the "public," it seemed they merrily left difficulty at home, leapt into colloquial language with both feet, added unnatural (and frankly unfunny) jokes, talked about TV, took on a tone chummy and unctuous. They dumbed down, in short—even with the most innocent intentions. The public, even the "general reader," seemed to mean someone less adept, ingenious, and critical than themselves.... The public signified fun, frothy, friendly.... [T]alking down to readers in a colorless fashion-magazine argot is such second nature that any alternative seems out of place.
This was emphatically not what the old "public intellect," and Partisan Review, had addressed to the public. Please don’t blame the junior professors, though. (Graduate students, it must said, did much better for n+1, as they do still.)...
But the additional philosophical element that made this complicated arrangement work, and the profound belief that sustained the fiction, on all sides, and made it "real" ... was an aspirational estimation of "the public." Aspiration in this sense ... [is] something like a neutral idea or expectation that you could, or should, be better than you are—and that naturally you want to be better than you are, and will spend some effort to become capable of growing—and that every worthy person does. My sense of the true writing of the "public intellectuals" of the Partisan Review era is that it was always addressed just slightly over the head of an imagined public—at a height where they must reach up to grasp it. But the writing seemed, also, always just slightly above the Partisan Review writers themselves. They, the intellectuals, had stretched themselves to attention, gone up on tiptoe, balancing, to become worthy of the more thoughtful, more electric tenor of intellect they wanted to join. They, too, were of "the public," but a public that wanted to be better, and higher.
Which I largely agree with. It's a discussion I've been having elsewhere.
But my God, Mark! Fewer words. More meaning.