Halfway through writing an essay, I always encounter a barrier to continuing, and usually it first takes the form of impatience that my words have thus far forked no lightning, and then it becomes the urge to quit, which takes the form of accusing myself of having nothing valuable to say, of stating the obvious, of trying to make the fact that water is wet seem like a revelation. “Everybody knows this already” becomes a kind of auto-gaslighting that threatens to leave the essay decaying in my notebook, broken off like a limb in a storm.
Then, reading other essayists, I’m reminded that when you say a thing in new words, in a new way, you have said a new thing. Some might call this old wine in new bottles, but some old wine, depending on its vintage, is in fact the best. I think of the expression, “Well, since you put it that way…” spoken by someone who has just grasped an idea in conversation. And I do see the essay as an extension of conversation. That’s the birthright of the form as it has come down to us from Montaigne: “Human understanding is marvelously enlightened by daily conversation, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves and have our sights limited to the length of our own noses.” We have the essay, historians tell us, largely due to the death of Montaigne’s beloved friend Étienne, with whom he was in the habit of long walks and heart-to-hearts.
(By the way, Montaigne’s friend, Étienne de La Boetie, was the author of The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, written in 1552, which is especially apposite in this political moment. I’m not kidding; it’s available in paperback, translated by Harry Kurz. Check it out.)
This dialogic dimension requires humility. In one sense, an ethical one, you don’t get to talk and expect anyone to listen if you do not listen yourself, and if you are not open to the possibility that a real dialogue, even one with the blank page, might change your thinking, then you are writing in bad faith, advertising, propagandizing.
Essayists ask questions. That’s the beginning, middle, and end of it — they ask questions of the world surrounding them, naturally, but they also question themselves, their assumptions, biases, hopes, desires, and histories.
Adrienne Pilon asks hard questions, and she wants answers. Grief and loss require, in the case of ALS and other environmental diseases, the kind of forensic tenacity and clarity she demonstrates in her essay, “In Bloom,” which balances perfectly between grief and questioning.
Yuko Iida Frost visits Tuol Sleng, a school turned into a torture camp by the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian genocide. The experience of that horror’s reverberating aftermath is overwhelming, and the questions, having to do with justice, having to do with memory, with dignity, with what being human means, are explored carefully and quietly in “Phnom Penh 1997”
“ALICE In Wonderland” by Jennifer Zeuli also set in a school and also with the shadow of atrocity looming, brings us the reality of schoolteaching in America today with the looming threat of school shootings.
In “Fortune House,” Wally Suphap’s questioning is an attempt (an essai) to illuminate the “displacement and double consciousness in America’s racialized society” that immigrants and their children face.
“To give shape to moments lived and an order to memories, as recollection of the past and imagination of possible futures collide in the present” is the task Frances Hider has set for herself in her essay “Stop all the Clocks.” We want to stop the clocks, not time. We want to fully inhabit time, feel it, learn it, understand it, appreciate it, not merely use it. We want to question time’s nature and feel its full dimensionality, not just hear its “winged chariot.”
Sharon White, in “A Wilderness of Larks” asks, while contending with life-threatening illness, “How important is it to pick up all those old pieces of the story to keep on going in the new one?” And the question presages what seems a liberatory renewal and recovery.
Rajnesh Chakrapani, in “How my body remembers a poonal” delves into how we keep, and even treasure, beloved customs rooted in value systems we question. A performance artist, Chakrapani’s work (as illustrated here) is a bodily, sensual, cultural, and philosophical inquiry.
In all seven of these fine essays, the questions lead on to further questions, and prompt a reader’s own as well. That’s the beginning, middle, and end of it.
— Richard Hoffman
Richard Hoffman is the author of nine books, including the memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury; the story collection Interference and other stories; the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists and other essays; and five books of poems: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, which won the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry; and People Once Real.
