Paul Graham's The Age of the Essay is a vivid and a remarkable essay on the nature of "essay" itself. He makes an excellent diagnosis of our school time essay writing fallacies and helps pin down some crucial elements in the art of writing an essay. The excerpt says it all
"To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out."
Alexander Pope was was using these semantics when he titled his poem "Essay on Mankind". Similarly Ralph Waldo Emerson sounded true because he was so convincing in his ideas.
Graham argues that the current day rhetoric of take a position and defend it while reaching a pre-ordained solution as the cause for the yawn that is elicited from the readers of modern day essayists. I love the "surpise" and the "disobedience" sections of this essay.Read it and you are in for a treat.
1 comment:
We commiserate. This kind of things makes me lost in my own musings. Hope you feel better soon.
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