I've been reading essays - specifically, the Best American Essays series, which I now intend to collect if ever I can find them. The latest one is the 2003 volume, edited by Anne Fadiman, who writes a superb and friendly introduction. Minz introduced me to Anne Fadiman and I've seen a couple of her essays in other volumes. I now want a subscription to "The American Scholar"; anything once edited by Anne Fadiman can't be that bad, can it?
(Does it seem to you that one takes much longer to get comfortable - not proficient, but comfortable - in one's voice than to lose it? Things destroyed in a day and so on.)
It's not what I read essays for, but I found an essay in a previous Best American Essays volume which gave the definitive definition of Jewish prayer: Know before Whom you stand. That struck me because - O vanity - of its applicability to a secular faith, in small letters: know before whom you stand. It reminds me of one of Minz's entries on a passage by Mulisch. A conductor is having a bad day with his discouraged musicians when all of a sudden their playing picks up, better than he's ever heard it, as if they were responding to some other presence in the room. He turns around to find that they were - the distinguised conductor (I've forgotten the name) was standing in the doorway. Who stands on your threshold? It seems important - not that one should be able to answer this, exactly - but that one should be able to know where to look for an answer. It seems (seems!) that I have spent some two years now discarding old, dimly-understood thoughts and beliefs and prejudices gathered over four years of occasional study for something that settles like a boredom over the mind. Not to mention hideously mixed metaphors.
What I read essays for is to find gems like this, from an essay by Virginia Woolf quoting one of Addison's essays:
I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may be adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet; the peacock, parrot, and swan, shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells, and the rocks for gems; and every part of nature furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of it. All this I shall indulge them in; but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can nor will allow it.