First, a question. Is the essay dead? By 'essay', I don't mean an opinion piece, cover story, blog post, or a researched article, rather that which enjoys a shelf life of decades, if not centuries. Another loose way to describe it would be one that feels fallen from its author after appreciable gestation, as opposed to one put down to meet a deadline or to scratch a momentary itch. E.g., this is not Essay, nor is this, but this is.
So is the essayist endangered? Or am I panicking uninformed?
The Decay of Lying
by Oscar Wilde, that lord of language.
On Being the Right Size
by J.B.S. Haldane.
"For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across — which happened to be the Earth — where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Politics and the English Language
by George Orwell.
All his essays are equal, but some are more equal than others.
In Praise of Idleness
by Bertrand Russell.
The Onion has some thoughts on that.
A Quintessence of Dust
by Roger Ebert.
[as written in Apr 2016] My bookmarks tell me I have read 764 film reviews written by Roger Ebert. That’s a statistic having little to do with film: had he been a writer of village obituaries, I'd have read 764 of those. Insatiable is my appetite for his prose: science fiction short stories, a book of rice cooker recipes, a naughty screenplay, a journal of unlimited thoughts… He pours, I guzzle. The transaction once jolted to a week-long halt (exactly) three years ago now, but when all the tributes were read, daily service resumed from beyond the grave. To the next time I wait in a queue, or for the water to boil, or for the train to arrive, I look forward with an itch — out I can then whip my phone again and walk into something old Roger’d scribbled. At the least, I have 7074 reviews left.
Good Souls
by Dorothy Parker.
Few have heard of Dorothy Parker in spite of having somewhere read her couplet, “Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses.” If it wasn’t for Ogden Nash, Parker would’ve been my top poet, and if Twain and Wilde hadn’t breathed, might’ve been the most diabolical wit to have. She declared: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think”, said of her abortion: “It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard”, observed: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”, opined: “If all the girls attending the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised”, and thus opened a review: “The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.” Asked what the most beautiful English words were, she answered “cheque” and “enclosed”. To an editor inquiring of an overdue piece, she returned: “Too fucking busy — and vice versa.” The premier origamist of the English language, was Dorothy Parker. (“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”) Read her verse. Ask if it is possible to outjest “One Perfect Rose”, outmodulate “Now at Liberty”, outexpress “A Certain Lady” or outsculpt “Resumé”. If these make your heart too light for your taste, read her stories, and get it broken. Remarked her ardent devotee Ogden Nash: "To say that Mrs. Parker writes well is as fatuous, I'm afraid, as proclaiming that Cellini was clever with his hands. The trick about her writing is … there is no trick.” And what did she think of her own genius? “I hate writing. I love having written.”
The Eureka Phenomenon
by Isaac Asimov.
“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work… what I would like to tell you about today are the sequence of events, really the sequence of ideas, which occurred, and by which I finally came out the other end with an unsolved problem for which I ultimately received a prize.”
- opening remarks of Richard Feynman’s Nobel Lecture, delivered seven years before the following essay was published.
Jane Austen
by Virginia Woolf.
It is said of Paul Dirac that his discoveries were “exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky one after another”. I often feel this way about Jane Austen’s writing, at every scale — novel, chapter, paragraph, sentence, clause. And in every element — character, plot, style.
Virginia Woolf in this essay comes closest to decrypting why Austen feels so perfect. An excerpt:
“One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was laid in the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at fifteen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes is finished and turned and set in its relation, not to the parsonage, but to the universe. She is impersonal; she is inscrutable. […] Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and we know precisely where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is.”