The Best American Essays 2014 Read online

  The task is not to say that Montaigne meant this and not that by Essais, but to understand that the above-sketched polysemia of the word was precisely what he was up to with it, and indeed the reason he chose it, for if a book would be a true mirror, it must always reflect back in the direction from which it’s approached. He will leave not one but many doors open to his readers. You may enter him through his likable talkativeness, his confessional, conspiratorial intimacy (he remains one of the few writers in history to have possessed the balls to admit he had a small penis), through his learning, through the possibly un-reattained depth of his psychological penetration, through the consolation he offers in times of sorrow—come whichever way you want, the door is there in the writing, and it’s there in the title.

  Nevertheless, at the center of it all, when you’ve peeled back every visible layer, there dwells this binary, this yin/yang, this Heisenbergian flickering between two primary meanings, between a stricter definition of the essay (the proof, the trial, the examination) and a looser one (the sally, the amateur work performed with panache, the whatever-it-is). The duality was noticed and articulated by one of Montaigne’s earliest and most important readers, François Grudé, or, as he was better known, the sieur de La Croix du Maine. In his influential Bibliothéques, a kind of literary-biographical digest, he included Montaigne and praised him. This was in 1584, when the latter was still alive and writing (also the year in which King James’s book came out). Grudé had read only Montaigne’s first volume, but on that evidence alone put him into a company with Plutarch. Grudé gets credit for being one of the first people to realize that Montaigne was Montaigne. In 1584, among the lettered, the majority report on the writer was: lightweight, garrulous, and—interestingly for us—a woman’s writer.2 But Grudé got it, got that there was something very serious happening in the Essais, that here was a man inspecting his mind as a means of inspecting the human mind. Helpfully for us, Grudé gets into the meaning of the word, of the title, just a few years after Montaigne had introduced it (the first thing they noticed about it was the ambiguity!). He writes:

  In the first place, this title or inscription is quite modest, for if one takes the word “Essay” in the spirit of “coup d’Essay,” or apprenticeship, it sounds very humble and self-deprecating, and suggests naught of either excellence or arrogance; yet if the word be taken to mean instead “proofs” or “experiments,” that is to say, a discourse modeling itself on those, the title remains well chosen.

  What’s marvelous to observe is how this original dichotomy, which existed fully formed in Montaigne’s mind, between the looser and stricter conceptions of the essay—the flourish and the finished, the try and the trial—transposed itself onto the one that existed between France and England. If the French will largely repent of the essay’s more casual and intimate qualities (and even its name), in the wake of Montaigne, England runs into their arms.3 Something in Montaigne’s voice, the particular texture of its introspection, opened a vein that had been aching to pop. Ben Jonson describes a literary pretender of the day, writing: “All his behaviours are printed, and his face is another volume of essays.” And notice, it’s clear from the start that the definition of essay the English are working with is the looser one, the one having to do with apprenticeship. That original tuning note King James had struck. Or perhaps one should say that the emphasis is on that signification, with the other one, the more serious one, now switching places and assuming the role of subfrequency. It isn’t a unified national definition or anything like that; there are many definitions, as earlier in France, but they all strike that apologetic tone. In fact, in the first English attempt to pin down this odd new creature, the essay—William Cornwallis’s “Of Essays and Books,” from Discourses upon Seneca, published in 1601 (the year in which Robert Johnson defines his own Essais as “imperfect offers”)—Cornwallis, with a comedy both intentional and un-, begins by arguing that Montaigne had actually been misusing the term. Whereas the English were using it correctly, you see. “I hold,” he writes, “none of these ancient short manner of writings, nor Montaigne’s, nor such of this latter time to be rightly termed essays, for though they be short, yet they are strong, and able to endure the sharpest trial: but mine are essays, who am but newly bound prentice.”4

  From this initial mushroom ring of essayists that crops up on the island around 1600, the infestation spreads. Then comes the Grub Street explosion, and the essay is an eighteenth-century pop form. There are millions of pages of gazettes and daily journals and moral weeklies to fill. The word becomes a blazon for the early Enlightenment. It’s the age of what Thackeray will christen “the periodical essayists of the eighteenth century.” England becomes a nation of essayists every bit as much as it was ever one of shopkeepers, and the essay becomes . . . whatever we say it is. In the words of Hugh Walker—whose English Essay and Essayists remains the most lucid single-volume work on the genre a century after its publication—the genre becomes the “common” of English literature, “for just as, in the days before enclosures, stray cattle found their way to the unfenced common, so the strays of literature have tended towards the ill-defined plot of the essay.”

  But always—this is what I’m trying to say—with that original note hanging in the air, as both counterblast and guiding horn. Not King James’s note, mind you. Montaigne’s. The singularity. The word with its fullest, richest, Tiresian ambiguity, and the example of the writer himself, his bravery and rigor, his cheek. The modern essay develops not in any one country but within a transnational vibrational field that spans the English channel. It assumes many two-sided forms: trial/try, high/low, literature/journalism, formal/familiar, French/English, Eyquem/Ockham. The vital thing is that the vibration itself be there. Without it you have no “essays,” you have only the Essais. To edit this anthology, I looked first for pieces in which the field was strong.

  James was sitting there. It was January of 1610. Donne and Bacon and Joseph Hall and the rest of the gang were in the audience too—they may have been, so let’s say they were. And the boys were performing Jonson’s Epicœne. It’s a lad who is playing, for the first time, the role of Sir John Daw, a knight. John Daw = Jack Daw = jackdaw, a bird that, like a magpie, likes to pick up and collect shiny things, such as classical quotations. Jack Daw may be a satirical representation of Bacon himself—more than one scholar has wondered. In the story, he has just been forced (it doesn’t take much forcing) to recite some of his work. The work is ludicrous. But his listeners, meaning by flattery to draw him into further clownishness, tell him that it possesses “something in’t like rare wit and sense.” Indeed, they say—sounding already like us, when we go on about the essay’s origins—“’tis Seneca . . . ’tis Plutarch.”

  Jack Daw, in the silliness of his vanity, takes the comparison as an insult. “I wonder,” he says, that “those fellows have such credit with gentlemen!”

  “They are very grave authors,” his little crowd assures him.

  “Grave asses!” he says. “Meere essayists, a few loose sentences and that’s all.”

  Essayists: that’s when it enters the world, with that line. The first thing we notice: that the word is used derisively and dismissively. And yet the character using it is one toward whom we’re meant to feel derisive and dismissive. A pretentious ass. Who may be jibingly based on the inventor of the essay, Francis Bacon. On top of everything, the moment transpires before the eyes of the very monarch who had imported the word in the first place, initiating this long dialogue, and who is himself irretrievably but undoubtedly implicated somehow in the nesting doll of Jonson’s wit.

  How could we possibly trust any creature that comes into the world wearing such a caul of ambiguity? That’s “essayists.” Four hundred and four years later, they continue—as it was my privilege to find in editing this anthology—to flourish.

  JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

  TIMOTHY AUBRY

  A Matter of Life and Death

  FROM The Point

/>   Now you become my boredom and my failure,

  Another way of suffering, a risk . . .

  —Philip Larkin

  OFTEN AT NIGHT I dream that I’ve found some dangerous object lying on the floor and swallowed it. I sit up, coughing violently, trying to force it back out. I turn to my wife and tell her that I’ve ingested something potentially fatal, and what should I do? If she wakes up grouchy, she snaps, “Be quiet! I’m trying to sleep!” Startled, I recover myself, realize it’s just the same nightmare I always have, and feel acutely embarrassed, hoping my wife won’t remember the interruption the next morning. Other times she rubs my arm and says gently, “It’s okay. You’re fine. You didn’t swallow anything. Go back to sleep, babe.” The next morning she asks me, “How do you even know I’m there? I mean, aren’t you dreaming? Why do you have to get me involved?”

  Being left alone in my room in the dark used to be the scariest part of my life. I’ve been having night terrors as long as I can remember. At a pretty young age, I figured out that monsters hiding under the bed or even regular human intruders did not pose the greatest threat to my existence, and having seen a few too many episodes of Michael Landon’s Highway to Heaven, about an angel who tends to the needs of dying children, I directed my fears at a more likely possibility: disease, and more specifically, Cancer.

  One time, when I was around eight, I had a violent flu, and the whole time my older sister kept giving me significant looks, like she wanted to tell me something. Though I was pretty out of it, I couldn’t help but notice, and I became convinced that this was it. Dr. Elisofon had already delivered the news to my family: I had Cancer, I was dying, my sister knew but she didn’t want to tell me, and I was just going to have to accept it.

  Eventually I discovered why she’d been giving me all those concerned stares. A couple nights before, my father, apparently, had gotten in very late. Still awake, my mother had said, “I don’t expect you to come home for me anymore. But when your son is running a 103-degree fever, you might think about leaving the bar before 2 A.M.” To which he had responded, “If you knew where I actually was tonight, then you’d be really mad.” And thus it turned out that the big secret responsible for my sister’s displays of anxiety was not Cancer but Divorce. My mom had decided to wait until I was feeling better to tell me. I wasn’t dying, but my parents were splitting up. Life and death, marriage and divorce—ever since then, they’ve been all mixed up in my head, each one at times standing in for one of the others.

  The problem with marriage, we all know, is the endlessness of it. Plenty of things we do will have long-term repercussions, but in what other situation do you promise to do something for the rest of your life? Not when you choose a college. Not when you take a job. Not when you buy a house. During childhood, you pick up many habits that are probably going to be lifelong, like walking, talking, reading, and sleeping, but once you’ve got those down, you start to feel like you’re at greater liberty to decide what things you want to do and what things you want to stop doing. Especially when you’re a young adult, the apparently infinite multiplicity of possible choices—possible jobs, possible friends, possible cities, possible girlfriends or boyfriends—can sometimes fool you into thinking you have an infinite amount of time to try out everything. But once you’re married, you’ve significantly cut down the options, and it suddenly makes your life feel shorter—like now there’s a direct line between you and your own death. You’ve just gotten on a train and you won’t get off until the very end of the track. In your final moments, if you stick to your promise, you’ll still be doing the same thing you’re doing now, dealing with the same person, possibly having the same arguments. And that commonality between now and then makes that far-off time, when you’re old and sick and about to die, a little more imaginable. Which is scary.

  Apparently even my father didn’t quite escape this predicament. Although they were no longer married, my mother was still there with him in the hospital on the day he died of lung cancer at age sixty. And she even managed to subject him to one of their old familiar rituals, though he wasn’t exactly in a condition to notice. Apparently after the nurse declared him dead and shepherded me, my sister, and my two aunts out into another room, while we were all hugging and crying, my mother stayed in the room with my father’s body in order to give him a final piece of her mind. “How could you?” she asked him. “How could you take such bad care of yourself and abandon your two kids like this?” My parents had been divorced for over fifteen years, and my father was dead, but my mother wanted to get in one last good fight.

  I was stunned when my mother told me afterward what she had just done. You had to have some pretty strong feelings, after all, to stand there yelling at a corpse. Did my mother still love my father? Perhaps, but I also think his death had taken something important from her—something distinct from love that marriage offers to us all. Watching her two kids collapse into sobs, she’d looked at their faces and thought about how they’d have to spend the rest of their lives fatherless, with one less person really looking out for them. Though they were both technically adults, one pregnant with her first child, they’d seemed to her especially vulnerable and helpless, and she wanted someone to blame. The causes of their distress were too big to comprehend and pretty much beyond anyone’s control: disease, aging, and death. So my dad, who could at least have tried to quit smoking, represented a much more tangible and more satisfying target for her grievances.

  Marriage gives you someone to blame—for just about everything. Before you get married, when you feel depressed, you think to yourself, Is this it? And by “it” you mean life. Is this all life has to offer? Just one day followed by another? The same dreary routine? Etc. But after you get married, you think to yourself, Is this it? And by “it” you mean marriage. If your life feels monotonous, devoid of possibilities, static, two-dimensional, whatever, you don’t blame your life; you blame your marriage. As a thing that’s supposed to fill up your days until you die, your marriage becomes like an emblem of your life, like a kind of plastic insulation that’s pressed all the way up against the very borders of your existence. It’s much easier to blame the stuff lining the walls than the room itself. And there is, you sometimes remind yourself, just a little space between the lining and the outer boundaries, and thus it allows you to trick yourself into thinking if you could just get into that space between where your marriage ends and your life continues, or if you could somehow tear down the plastic, escape the confines of your marriage, life would suddenly be vibrant and rich and unexpected and mysterious again. So maybe the greatest gift marriage gives us is the chance to fantasize, to imagine that there’s more to life than there actually is, and it accomplishes this by assuming responsibility for all the misery and dullness that we would otherwise equate with life itself.

  But it’s not actually marriage that does this: it’s your spouse. One saintly individual steps forward and volunteers to be the fall guy, to absorb the entirety of your existential bitterness for decades to come, so that you can think life isn’t quite as bad as you once feared, since everything that’s wrong with it is actually your spouse’s fault. Even if you don’t ever act on your feelings, from this point forward you can believe that you don’t have to die in order to escape from the dreary reality in which you sometimes feel trapped; you can just get divorced. Your marriage partner, in other words, allows you to hold on to your hope. It’s a profound gesture of total, thankless altruism, if you think about it, but you don’t think about it, because, by virtue of the particular service they’re providing, you’re too busy feeling resentful to feel the appropriate gratitude.

  Much to her chagrin, and at the cost of her own hopes of sleeping soundly through the night, my wife’s presence intrudes all the way into my private nightmares. Even when I should be getting away from everything that’s troubling or annoying me, into some otherworldly place where I can forget who I am and what I believe my life has become, my wife is still somehow there. And not
just an imagined version, but the actual physical person, right at the threshold of my bad dream, ready to pull me back into the room, either kindly or cruelly, so I can think, as I regain my sense of reality and watch her as she tries to get back to sleep, Thanks to you, I’m no longer afraid. I thought I had eaten something deadly, but I was wrong. What a relief to realize that you’re still here, I’m not dead, and we’re going to be together like this for as long as I can imagine.

  WENDY BRENNER

  Strange Beads

  FROM Oxford American

  Virtually anything can become an amulet, depending on beliefs and resources.

  —Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical & Paranormal Experience

  THE PAIN IN MY MIDSECTION felt like a dull routine by the time I came across the Vintage brass Made in India red and white mother of pearl bracelet, a pretty little scallop-edged bangle that caught my eye as I was idly scrolling around on eBay. There was something charismatic about it, winking out from its dark tiny cell of a thumbnail photo. It seemed to appeal to me personally, like a particular kitten or puppy at the pound who makes eye contact. It gave me déjà vu, reminded me of some dim, distant place I couldn’t quite identify. It recalled, suddenly and vividly, the doomed Pier 1 Imports store that opened a block away from my childhood home in the mid-1970s, not yet a brightly lit corporate clone but a dark warehouse full of a thousand genuinely foreign trinkets and uncategorizable tchotchkes, with aquariums of live tropical fish and hermit crabs lining the back wall. My sister and I stopped in daily to peruse, buy, or shoplift small mysterious items—worry dolls, Belgian gumdrops, incense cones—before the store’s roof collapsed under the weight of wet snow in the Chicago blizzard of 1979. I was twelve that year, haunted by those fish and crabs freezing to death in the ruins. When spring came, the building was torn down and a nice new public library constructed in its place. No one said what happened to the hermit crabs.