EssaysSome of our favorite essays:
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Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life by Nancy Mairs
Perennial Library, 1986
Essays, 154 pages
Though she cannot put it this way at the outset, Nancy Mairs is determined to make sense of who she is in a world that would more readily embrace someone else. In this series of personal essays, she fearlessly and honestly explores her life. We see her journey from total preoccupation with “getting a man” to recognition of the need for wholeness and the striving toward independence, with all its attendant terror and just plain messiness. Mairs turns the light on in every room of her house—depression, agoraphobia, multiple sclerosis, sexuality, motherhood, the necessity of writing—and in the process finds a herself at home. Mairs is willing to speak the unspeakable, to look at the scary stuff. In illuminating her own life, she shows us much about ourselves as well. C.W.
Excerpt
All the same, if a cure were found, would I take it? In a minute. I may be a cripple, but I’m only occasionally a loony and never a saint. Anyway, in my brand of theology God doesn’t give bonus points for a limp. I’d take a cure; I just don’t need one. A friend who also has MS startled me once by asking, “Do you ever say to yourself, ‘Why me, Lord?’” “No, Michael, I don’t,” I told him, “because whenever I try, the only response I can think of is ‘Why not?’” If I could make a cosmic deal, who would I put in my place? What in my life would I give up in exchange for sound limbs and a thrilling rush of energy? No one. Nothing. I might as well do the job myself. Now that I’m getting the hang of it.
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Against Joie De Vivre by Phillip Lopate
Poseidon Press, 1989
Essays, 335 pages
In his essay “What Happened to the Personal Essay?” Phillip Lopate says that sometimes, when reading an essay, there is nothing for the reader to do but “surrender to this companionable voice, thinking alone in the dark.” It is indeed a pleasure to surrender as we join Lopate thinking out loud on paper about a wide variety of subjects. In the title essay, with curmudgeonly relish, he decries ritualized joie de vivre, as in the self-congratulatory and forced pleasantness of The Dinner Party. He is not, however, all curmudgeon as he reveals when he describes and analyzes in “Chekhov for Children” the challenge and reward of working with 5th and 6th graders to produce Uncle Vanya. Lopate is consistently thoughtful and entertaining, and writes so well that at times you may forget you are reading. C.W.
Excerpt
Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live. Not that I disapprove of all hearty enjoyment of life. A flushed sense of happiness can overtake a person anywhere, and one is no more to blame for it than the Asiatic flu or a sudden benevolent change in the weather (which is often joy’s immediate cause). No, what rankles me is the stylization of this private condition into a bullying social ritual.
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A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Originally published 1929
Essay, 118 pages
Virginia Woolf’s essay on the intellectual liberation of women began with her thoughts on women and fiction as she prepared to address an English arts society in 1928. Instead of reviewing at length, as one might expect, the works of Jane Austen or George Eliot, she ruminates in a highly readable and lively style about more basic questions. What conditions are necessary to create a work of art? Why is one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? Why didn’t women in Elizabethan times write poetry, when any man seemed capable of a sonnet? What would have been the fate of Judith Shakespeare, an imaginary and equally gifted sister of William? Woolf concludes that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” She means this literally, but also symbolically. Money is “the power to contemplate;” a lock on the door is “the power to think for oneself.” J.G.
Excerpt
For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.
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Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Originally published 1854
Essay, 297 pages
One of the most influential books in American literature, Walden is Thoreau’s account of the two years he spent in a small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond. Written in a simple and direct style that echoes his philosophy of “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” Thoreau’s journal abounds with the details of survival as well as with his provocative and profound ideas. He has opinions about practically everything and does not hesitate to criticize his more conventional neighbors for their lives of “quiet desperation.” His peace-loving and nonmaterialistic philosophy has been cited by authors, statesmen and liberators all over the world who would uplift people’s lives. Everyone should read Walden, and return to it again and again, each time finding something new and remarkably wise. Walden can be a life-changing book. R.T.
Except
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
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In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens by Alice Walker
Harvest Books, 1984
Essays, 393 pages
In order to fulfill our creative selves, we must look to the women who came before us, says Alice Walker in this book of essays. We must search, in essence, for the artist in our mothers—whether it be in gardens, paintings, poetry, literature, or appreciation of the beauty in each of us. Walker recounts her search for Zora Neale Hurston, her own literary forerunner. She writes of women oppressed, of the experience of the black writer and of the effect being black and being a woman have on everything. She reflects on her experience with the civil rights movement, and on what it means to be a revolutionary. This book is full of the spirit of women as creative beings. Anyone who is a womanist—who loves and values women—will find treasure in these essays. J.M.
Excerpt
Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength—in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
And perhaps in Africa over two hundred years ago, there was just such a mother; perhaps she painted vivid and daring decorations in oranges and yellows and greens on the walls of her hut; perhaps she sang—in a voice like Roberta Flack’s—sweetly over the compounds of her village; perhaps she wove the most stunning mats or told the most ingenious stories of all the village storytellers. Perhaps she was herself a poet—though only her daughter’s name is signed to the poems that we know.
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Changing Community Scott Walker, Editor
Graywolf Press, 1993
Essays, 287 pages
The subject of “community” is a hot topic these days. What is it and why is it important? Traditional definitions don’t seem to hold anymore in our increasingly fluid social milieu. Are there new ways of thinking about “community” that can accommodate modern realities? In Changing Community, Scott Walker has collected an array of essays that address a wide range of issues relating to community—from the role of individual citizens and leaders to discussions of bio-regionalism and the need to organize communities in harmony with ecosystems.
Particularly thoughtful and provocative among these essays is “Politics, Morality and Civility” by Vaclav Havel, playwright and President of the Czech Republic. His belief in the moral roots of politics and in the “goodwill of the people” holds out a vision of hope for the future and much to think about. C.W.
Excerpt
I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence. They want to be told about this publicly. They want to know that those “at the top” are on their side. They feel strengthened, confirmed, hopeful. Goodwill longs to be recognized and cultivated. For it to develop and have an impact it must hear that the world does not ridicule it…people want to hear that decency and courage make sense, that something must be risked in the struggle against dirty tricks. They want to know they are not alone, forgotten, written off.
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