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An architecture of thinking 


George Orwell
| Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

You can’t do a painting on a painting or a novel on a novel, but you can write an essay on an essay. With that thought in mind, I sat down to it, and soon Donald Barthelme’s line popped into my head: “The writer is that person who, embarking upon his task, does not know what to do.” 

Yet even those who do not know what to do can write an essay on the not knowing. Such is the elasticity of the form, at once rooted and slippery. Brian Dillon, who has written a book on the subject, Essayism identifies in the form a  “combination of exactitude and evasion” whose strength sometimes lies in incompleteness. The essay’s elusiveness then is at the opposite end of the scale from the precision and form of poetry. The anti-essay is an essay too. 

The moment you define an essay, you put it into a straitjacket and away from other equally valid definitions. Whatever you say about the essay is true, and so is its opposite. 

At some stage in writing about the essay, it is necessary to make references to Montaigne and Bacon, Orwell and Woolf, and from closer to our times Didion and Solnit. OK, so that’s done. It is also necessary to insist that the essay does not submit to a ready definition. So there you are. 

Essays can be short or long (a New York Times column once had just one word – does that count as an essay?); the only consideration is that they give pleasure or provoke a reaction. You can argue, justify, educate, gossip, criticise, explain, advise, satirise, or inspire. But if you must bore, then it must be in a higher cause, like making a point about excitement by focusing on its opposite. 

The essay, no matter what the subject, is a self-portrait. It bares the soul of the writer unlike any other form barring poetry. 

The essay is not so much about the reader as about the writer. I feel, I hear, I think, I suppose, I believe rather than what you should or how you should do these things. Poetry has its rules, the essay is free; the mind is at play and you can either stand aside and watch or join in. 

You find a voice, or the voice finds you. You need to find a persona that is very much like you but slightly caricatured, said the essayist Anne Fadiman in her usual understated humorous way – see how we understand Fadiman better after reading that. The idea of the caricature is insightful. It is a guard against self-indulgence. 

Like a painter, an essayist slices a bit of his imagination and places it on the page (or screen) for public consumption. Or as private catharsis. Information or opinion is incidental. 

To write an essay is to erect an architecture of thinking, to build a place where a certain thought is possible. I don’t know who said that, but it seems a broad enough church to harbour most essays. 



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