In Praise of Everbrown.

There is a word the content trade reaches for when it wants to praise a piece of writing: evergreen. The evergreen article is the one that never goes out of date, the explainer that will rank in search results in five years as well as today, the asset, to use the word they use, that keeps paying. It is a botanical compliment, and like most compliments paid by an industry to itself, it describes a wish rather than a thing. The evergreen piece is built to stay fresh, which means it is built to say nothing that could spoil: no date, no name that might fade, no joke that depends on a moment, no opinion that the years could embarrass. It achieves its permanence the way a plastic plant achieves its: by declining, in advance, to be alive.

I want to make the case for the other tree. Call it everbrown.

Everbrown writing does not try to stay fresh. It accepts, from the first sentence, that its greenness is a season and will pass: the references will date, the examples will acquire a faint antique smell, the urgent occasion that produced it will be forgotten by everyone including, eventually, its author. The everbrown piece is written in full knowledge of this, the way one plants an oak in full knowledge of the calendar. It does not fight the browning. It composes for it.

Consider what is actually lost when a piece of writing ages, and what is not. The freshness goes, certainly: the topical hook, the of-the-moment example, the sense that the thing is news. The color drains. But look at a genuinely good old essay, an autumn leaf held to the light, and notice how much structure survives the loss of color. The architecture of the argument is still there, every beam of it. The turns of thought still turn. The voice still speaks, in its particular cadence, from across however many decades, and the voice is the last thing to fade, often the only thing that never does. A dated reference in a well-made essay is not a flaw; it is a leaf that has gone from green to gold, and if you happen to recognize it, if you remember the forgotten controversy or the vanished public figure the writer assumed you knew, it flares back into a moment of private color that the evergreen piece, having no references at all, could never offer you. The obsolescence becomes a gift to the reader who was there, and a pleasant mystery to the one who wasn't.

This is why old letters, old diaries, old essays on dead quarrels remain worth reading long after their subjects have turned to dust. Nobody now needs Hazlitt's opinion of a painter whose work they will never see, or Lamb's account of a roast pig, or Montaigne's view of a sixteenth-century cannibal debate. The information is spoiled; the milk is years off. And yet we read them, in their thousands still, for the one thing in them that did not spoil and was never going to: the quality of the mind moving, the exact and unrepeatable way the sentences are made. The structure held. The style held. Everything that was merely fresh fell away, and what remained was the thing that was actually valuable, which had been the style all along, wearing the fresh material as a coat it would eventually take off.

Here is the proposition, stated plainly, because it is the whole of the matter: a style should be enough, by itself, to make a piece worth keeping. Not the timeliness, which expires. Not the information, which is superseded by Tuesday. The made quality of the thing: the rhythm, the angle of attention, the company of a particular voice. If a piece has only freshness, it dies the moment it stops being fresh, and the evergreen industry's whole anxious labor is the attempt to forestall that death by feeding the plant ever more preservative. But if a piece has style, it does not need to stay fresh at all. It is permitted to brown, the way good things are permitted to age: the wine, the wood, the photograph, the friendship. It goes the color of a well-handled book, and acquires the particular dignity of things that were made well enough to be allowed to grow old.

I would rather write one everbrown page than a hundred evergreen ones. The evergreen page is immortal in the way of plastic, which is to say it will outlast me without ever having been alive. The everbrown page will yellow, and its references will need footnotes, and one day a reader will encounter a name in it that means nothing to them and skim past it, and then, just possibly, another reader will encounter the same name and stop, and smile, because they knew it, and for them the gold leaf flares green again for the length of a breath.

That flare is the whole reward, and it is enough. Write so that the structure outlasts the season. Write so that the style alone would carry it. Then let it brown, with the door left open, in no hurry at all.

— L.U.