“In reading an essay, I want to feel that I’m communing with a real person, and a person who cares about what he or she’s writing about. The words sound sentimental and trite, but the qualities are rare. For me, the ideal essay is not an assignment, to be dispatched efficiently and intelligently, but an exploration, a questioning, an introspection. I want to see a piece of the essayist. I want to see a mind at work, imagining, spinning, struggling to understand. If the essayist has all the answers about something, you continually grapple with it, because it is alive in you. It thrashes and moves, like all living things.
When I’m reading a good essay, I feel that I’m going on a journey. The essayist is searching for something and taking me along. That something could be a particular idea, an unraveling of identity, a meaning in the wallow of observations and facts. The facts are important but never enough. An essay, for me, must go past the facts, an essay must travel and move. Even the facts of the essayist’s own history, the personal memoir, are insufficient alone. The facts of personal history provide anchor, but the essayist then swings in a wide arc on his anchor line, testing and pulling hard.
~Alan Lightman in “The Ideal Essay.”
I was very intrigued in Lightman’s views on an “ideal” essay. Before reading his quote, I never thought of an essay in such a light. My view was that an essay was just a boring assignment written on material that nobody really cared about. However, after reading Lightman’s take on an essay, I feel that essays can be much more exciting and innovative than ever before.
In this quote, Lightman personifies the essay, saying, “an essay must travel and move.” I definitely agree with this, because if an essay doesn’t grasp your attention and make your mind wander with it, then there is no point or desire to continue reading it. As Lightman said, “If the essayist has all the answers, then he isn’t struggling to grasp, and I won’t either.” People don’t want to read an essay that is supposedly full of all the answers, if that’s what they wanted they could turn to a collegiate textbook on a certain subject. Reading an essay should be different. It should let you see the author’s mind at work about a subject that takes the reader on a journey.
I believe that all the points made by Lightman are very valid and that essayists should take his ideas into consideration when writing and just let their thoughts shine in their writing. I really like how his views take you away from the stereotypical outlook on an essay and spotlight the fact that essays should be more of an excursion into your mind trying to grasp something that is very real to you and that you want to translate from your mind into words for others to see. I agree with Lightman that an essay needs to be on a topic that you care about so you can really let the reader see your knowledge and opinions on the subject.
An essay is like a journey through the labyrinth of tunnels in your mind and I believe that Lightman’s quote exemplified this statement. I also can tell that he truly believes this because, just by reading his quote, you could see a piece of his mind at work.
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