Essays

The essay was invented by one man in a tower who wanted to know what he actually thought. Montaigne still runs this wing; everyone else pays rent. Sontag will scold you for interpreting, Barthes will read a wrestling match like scripture, and Thoreau will lecture you on simplicity from a cabin his mother did laundry for, a fact that does not diminish Walden so much as season it. The essay forgives nothing, its writers least of all. It is thinking with the door open. If novels are marriages, these are the conversations that run to four in the morning, and you will find yourself quoting them for years without meaning to.

Thoreau lived a mile from Concord, walked into town constantly, and famously took his laundry home, then wrote as though he had discovered self-reliance alone among the bean rows. Economy, the opening section, hectors for eighty pages before the pond gets a word in. You need a high tolerance for being lectured on simplicity by a man with a mother nearby.

— against Walden

Sontag legislates more than she argues; the essays are verdicts delivered from a great height, and the famous call for an erotics of art is itself a thesis about how to interpret. Half the collection now requires footnotes: happenings, Marat/Sade, the downtown ephemera of 1964. You admire the sensibility while the objects of it fade.

— against Against Interpretation

Most of the targets need footnotes now: Poujadism, the Abbé Pierre's beard, a mid-1950s Tour de France. Then the playful essays stop and 'Myth Today' arrives, fifty pages of semiological theory that reads like a sterner book stapled to the back. Barthes's method outlived his examples; expect to do some archaeology before you watch it work.

— against Mythologies