from the editor
Untying the Knot
“Isn’t the very act of setting…things down evidence of some vexation, a clue that something is missing?
—Brian Dillon, Essayism
I know that I would not be saying anything controversial if I were to take a moment to extoll the value, dare I say the virtue, of walking into a random bookshop and leisurely perusing the shelves. Especially when said bookshop is of the independent variety, housed in an old, preferably labyrinthine, building. The kind of pleasure that one gets from this kind of experience is, for most of us, I suspect, a truism that happens to be true. I have found, however, that this experience is uniquely amplified when said bookshop happens to be in an unfamiliar city or town; when you have happened upon the shop purely by chance; when you enter the shop with no plan, no list of what you’re looking for, no expectations—in short, when you enter with an explorer’s attitude and a readiness to be surprised.
I think that I’ve known this ‘truth’ for a while, but recently I had a wonderful chance to live (re-live?) it. My youngest daughter and I were visiting Scotland to celebrate her graduation, and on our first morning in Edinburgh, after nearly 400 miles of driving the day before, from Skye, through the Highlands, to the northeast coast, and then south to Edinburgh, I rose early and set out in search of coffee. That’s when I found Topping & Company Booksellers, possibly one of the most charming and impressive bookshops I’ve ever visited. A week of travel and awakening in yet another foreign city had disoriented me just enough that I entered the shop with no plan, without intention, and wandered from room to room in such a haphazard way that it must have looked as if I’d never before been in a bookshop—leaving a room only to re-enter it again a moment later from another hallway, gazing at a row of shelves for minutes on end without moving, finally pulling down this or that book seemingly at random.
One of the most moving and humbling aspects of travel arises from the unfamiliar, the strange; we are outside of the security of home and routine, forced to look more closely at our surroundings so that we can properly, efficiently, and safely navigate. So often the beauty and wonder of the things that we see affect us more deeply than the same things (or at least very similar things) would affect us back home; we see more clearly, more intentionally, but also with a greater sense of the impermanence of places and things because we may only be in their presence for a few days or hours. To sit in a park or next to the creek in my Appalachian Mountain town, on any given day, is a wonderful experience; but to sit under the plane trees in Paulsplatz in old Frankfurt am Main and feel the deepening chill of late autumn, or to stand on a bluff and gaze out at the North Sea while the wind whips and the gulls circle and cry and the early July sun tries to break through the clouds, these moments, and so many others like them, are dear to me precisely because they were singular and brief. Things that would otherwise seem insignificant at home, if I noticed them at all—a cracking brown and red leaf falling at my feet, a tiny snail shell found on a sandy path—become disproportionately precious simply by being seen. Strangely, I experienced all of this in that enchanting bookshop at London Road and Leith Walk.
I can admit that it’s perhaps a bit silly of me to try to emphasize the strangeness of being in a bookshop where the authors are largely the same authors, published in the same language, that I would find back home. But I would also argue, as a first point, that foreign editions of books are very often more interesting (dare I say better) than the versions that I see everywhere back home. (If you don’t believe me, just look at the Penguin UK editions of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Ernesto Che Guevera’s The Motorcycle Diaries in comparison with any American editions and you’ll see what I mean.) More to the point, I was guided (more accurately, I was un-guided) by the openness of a wanderer or an explorer, unaffected by the prejudice of genres or classifications, simply because the bookshop that I happened to find myself in, in that moment, was itself in a new and strange place, and I’d spent days in the mindset of being in a new and strange place. And so it was that I happened upon Brian Dillon’s 2018 text Essayism.[1]But the point of the present essay is not to exalt a particular way of being in a bookshop, or even being in a bookshop at all; rather, the point arises from the pages of the book that I found by chance, simply by being in a bookshop in a particular way.
* * *
I love a good essay. Some of my favorite writers—Aciman, Camus, Baldwin, Erpenbeck—are known as much (if not more) for their fiction, but it’s their essays that affect me more deeply and inspire me more profoundly.[2] And as I read Dillon’s book, I think that I’ve begun to better understand some of the reasons for this. As a student, and later as an educator, my default presumption was often that the essay, at least in an academic setting, is meant to be a definitive statement, a final word, on a particular topic (or at least some aspect thereof) at hand. Whereas fiction could be more free and unstructured, wandering across perspectives and events with different, sometimes conflicting, emphases and intentions, the essay was supposed to have a clearly defined scope and convincingly resolve a question within that scope. This is what we were taught, from high school and before, right up through all of the advanced degrees. And while acknowledging that there are different purposes for different essays, largely dependent on the context of the essay, I still think that, regardless of the context, this very narrow idea of an essay, to a greater or lesser degree, ultimately misses the point of what an essay can, and perhaps should, be: the offering of a possible account, or perhaps possible accounts, but also an acknowledgment of the inherent, insurmountable limits to plausibility, imposed not just upon the particular account (or accounts) given by the essay but also on the greater endeavor itself toward certainty.
Yes, the term ‘essay’ signifies an attempt, which implies that the account given may be wrong and the attempt may thereby fail. But even by this understanding of ‘essay,’ it’s often presumed that the attempt is a complete attempt, that the account given by the essay is a homogenous, definitive whole, containing all that it must contain to prove its point and nothing more. The essay, according to this understanding, is itself a complete narrative, a perfect little instance of the discernment and defense of a particular truth. But again, this understanding fails to acknowledge an essential aspect of the essay and thus misses the point. By its very nature, the essay will never be capable of examining all of the evidence, considering all of the questions, weighing every possible answer; the essay will never be able to say all that can be said. Even the most unified, seemingly self-contained argument is but a tiny, enclosed, fabricated world; and though its walls may be tall and convincing, the presence of a larger world outside those walls is always looming, threatening to undermine all that is inside. This is a fact which the essay ought acknowledge. As Dillon argues, “here arises a conflict inside the essay as form: it aspires to express the quintessence or crux of its matter, thus to a sort of polish and integrity, and it wants at the same time to insist that its purview is partial, that being incomplete is a value in itself for it better reflects the brave and curious but faltering nature of the writing mind.” The presence of this irresolvable tension between certainty and doubt, between closure and incompleteness, is perhaps not only necessary in an essay but ultimately what gives an essay its profundity; while offering a possible account of a particular question, the essay simultaneously alludes to, and embraces, the incompleteness of any possible account and thus the ultimate impossibility of complete certainty. It’s Socrates, after exhaustively ‘proving’ the immortality of the soul and describing it’s fate after death, in a manner that seems to have finally convinced all of his listeners, suddenly acknowledging that he may be wrong. Quoting Theodor Adorno, Dillon concludes: “The desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.”
The essay is not meant to produce definitive, unassailable answers; likewise, the essay writer ought not have ‘Truth’ as their goal. The essay is an account of a process which, even at the essay’s end, is still ongoing—and that’s one of the true beauties of the essay. Its perpetual pursuit, while yielding unending questions, can also yield endless delight. The purpose and pleasure of the essay is to engage the questions in such a manner that, even when offering somewhat convincing answers to the those questions, still venerates both the questions themselves and the inherent questionability of all things. The joy of essay-ing is not in having a clean, straight piece of string; rather, the joy is in untying the knot. In seeking answers, the essay, at its best, embodies a greater reverence for the gaps in knowledge and understanding that may never be filled.
Notes
[1] Not to belabor a point, but compare the cover of the UK Fitzcarraldo Edition with that of the New York Review Books edition. I’m just saying…
[2] I would add Sebald here, if not for the fact that his fiction is so essayistic as to almost make the distinction between essay and fiction moot.
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