What are essays or what is an essay? Unfortunately, a huge part of our exposure to the essay arises from within academic context, conflating it with argument, analysis, hypothesis, thesis. This is very narrow, institutionalized, association constricts and chokes the full meaning and potential of what an essay can be.
The essay is not limited to an article that proposes an argument, or perspective. In fact, essays can be unbounded, creative, personal, often humorous and sometimes meandering. In reality, it’s form is hybrid, amorphous. In the words of Robert Johnson, an essay is an “irregular undirected piece” and not a regular or orderly performance. Professor Hugh Walker offers the following description of meandering: essays are a relatively short composition and something incomplete, unsystematic. Essays have a creative capacity that is fundamentally connected with exploration and experimentation.
Is this a failure to determine the qualities or taxonomy of an essay?— ambiguity is in fact the genre’s strength, literary or not. ESSAY CLUB is real and celebrates the following types of essays:
- Written essays
- Video or film essays
- █████████ essays
- Poetic essays and poetry essays and cryptographic essays
- Life essays
- Strobe essays for ESSAY CLUB
Perhaps to define and better understand the nature of the essay, it could be helpful to excavate its historical origins and discover from where and whence the essay arose. Exploring these origins could reveal the mercurial nature of the essay, or in the words of Aldous Huxley, the essays ability to say “everything about almost anything”. In fact, as we continue our dive, we will continue to see the essay represented as an associative and open-ended process of exploration.
Join ESSAY CLUB, as we travel down the rabbit hole on the history of the essay.
Definitions and Etymology of essay – In the beginning was the word.
A definition essay is an essay where you take a term and work to define it. How is it possible then to define something that cannot be defined? By searching for it’s origin. What does the history of language, or etymology reveal about the nature of ESSAY CLUB?
The word essay has it’s roots in the French essai, trial, attempt. We can understand this as a trial to explore and test an idea, to attempt to seek the fullness of truth to the best of our current ability. It is related to science and experimentation, as a trial or process of testing; a putting to proof by experiment, the act of examining or testing something, such as a metal, to determine its quality or validity.
But this definition is not constrained the medium or ‘apparatus’ used for testing. In the weighing of the heart rite, the heart of the deceased is weighed on the scale against the feather of the goddess Maat, who personifies order, truth, and what is right. If the heart weighed more than the feather of Maat, it was immediately consumed by the monster Ammit. Essays are related to the Maater of the heart’s being in the world. To be human, to live here in this world, is to be put on trial. Therefore, a new form of essay within ESSAY CLUB that is currently being trialed is called a Life Essay.
Words in our language change and evolve, because language is unreal but alive. There is no other species known to date that can express infinite ideas (sentences) with a limited set of symbols (speech sounds and words). ESSAY CLUB reveres this idea.
Before and After Montaigne
It could be considered that Michel de Montaigne was the “father” of the essay, with his ‘Essais‘ being very popular in the french Renaissance and becoming some of the most influential writing in Western Literature. However, we propose that the essay as a form could be traced to some of the writings of Plutarch and certainly the writings of Seneca, which took the form of letters or epistles. Montaigne was a classicist, familiar with these writers and would quote heavily from Seneca. Francis Bacon’s Essays or Counsels Civil or Moral were also inspired by Seneca’s Letters.
In Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, we are confronted with a clear personality–an aging man, his intolerance of noise, his asthma, his dissilussion with public life, his everyday life, his meetings, his visit to resorts, his reporting on the deaths of acquaintances, his comforting image as one who enjoy restings and to stay in bed wrapped up, spending most of the time reading. Montaigne found the structure of these writings attractive because of their brevity, personality, treatment of moral topics and portrait of the author’s times. Like Montaigne’s Essays, the Letters are of a variable length and are free to discuss a variety of topics within on Letter. We arrive again at the winding course that the essay follows.
In his essays, Montaigne would often arrive at a totally different place than where he started his subject matter. The reader can notice the required acceptance for exploration to understand the nature of the quest for truth. The center is unknown in the Labyrinth until arrival.
In fact, it was Montaigne’s skeptical outlook that lead him to suggest that human beings are unable to arrive at knowledge or truth. His belief was that reason is incapable of demonstrating the most profound, ultimate truths or natures of things and we must rely on spiritual revelation and faith. Montaigne relied on divine revelation, denying the rationalist or speculative way of philosophizing that prevailed under the Scholastics since the Middle Ages. He viewed this practice as gibberish discussion, proselytizing the domain of science to be attached to the thinking of Aristotle and Galen. This outlook makes clear Montaigne’s influence of the Moral writings of Seneca and explains the commitment of ESSAY CLUB to Philosophy as a way of life.
bibliography
The Ultimate Derivation of Essay by J. P. Postgate
A Puzzling Literary Genre: Comparative Views of the Essay by Richard M. Chadbourne
SENECA’S LETTERS TO LUCILIUS AS A SOURCE OF SOME OF MONTAIGNE’S IMAGERY by Carol E. Clark
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