[foldr]

I want my clothes to be practical. Some people want this and want everyone else to know it, so they buy really ugly clothes just to prove that they don’t care about aesthetics.

You seem to think that it’s impossible for prose to be aesthetically pleasing and comprehensible at the same time. But in fact, the quoted text is both. If it had been written in a plainer style, I probably wouldn't have bothered reading all of it. So no trade off in this instance.

[dpark]

I find it neither. I find the phrasing off-putting and the content low for the number of words.

[foldr]

If you can't comprehend it, how have you managed to determine that the content is low for the number of words?

[dpark]

Now you're being disingenuous and borderline trolling.

At no point did I say it's literally impossible to read.

[foldr]

You said “Okay, but they'd also probably be able to understand it", which clearly implies that people wouldn't be able to understand the current text. Then you denied that the text was was "comprehensible" ("I find it neither [pleasing or comprehensible]").

I really don't think you can have it both ways on this one. If, contrary to what you've been suggesting, the style only has a minor impact on your ability to understand what is being said, then what's the issue? Why get so worked up about the fact that some esoteric French alchemist writing in 1929 isn't writing in the journalistic style that's currently in vogue?

[dpark]

You cannot be serious. I refuse to believe that you actually read this literally and cannot recognize nuance. If you read an article about the contents of Fort Knox and the vault is described as "impenetrable", would you write the author angrily asking how they could possibly know what's inside if it's "impenetrable"?

There's a wide spectrum between "easy to understand" and "literally impossible to understand". Everything to the left of "literally impossible to understand" can be understood (at least in part). That doesn't mean the effort is low. Hell, I can "understand" German but I'm going to spend a lot of time translating words I don't know.

Why are you so worked up about someone online doesn't share your love of flowery prose that you're willing to engage in borderline trolling to piss them off? Personally I don't care about Fulcanelli and had never heard of him before today. I do care about general quality of writing because I'm exposed to it constantly.

[foldr]

I don't think the impenetrability analogy works, because of course you don't have to be able to enter a vault to know what's in it; whereas by the nature of the thing, there isn't some kind of alternative means of figuring out what a text says that doesn't involve comprehending it.

As to why I'm worked up: you're expressing so much disdain for any piece of writing that doesn't give you exactly what you want in exactly the form that you want it. A big part of a humanities education used to be forcing people to read lots of pieces of writing that don't meet that description. I think that was broadly a good thing. Reading shouldn't be a purely transactional activity.