Prelude IV

The prelude on reading essays highlights the special pleasures of the essay. Like the other literary genres, the essay invites and gratifies active, deliberative reading; it rewards attention to its literary elements of voice and tone, style and structure, language and form. Although we may read essays to extract information and to acquire knowledge, we also read them for the literary pleasures they provide. The essay possesses its own pleasures, engages in its own forms of seduction. Essays come in many styles and flavors, reflect a wide variety of visions, and sound a chorus of varied voices. An essay can be about anything—from taking a nap to analyzing the state of the world economy, from everyday matters like hating an enemy and living with your pets to complex philosophical and scientific concepts like evolution and string theory. Identity is a frequent topic of essayists; so, too, are related issues of gender, race, and culture. Essayists are fond of writing about the natural world as well as the human race. Politics and religion afford many essayists opportunities for explanation, exploration, reflection, and debate. Essays invite and reward considered and thoughtful reading. Reading essays, in fact, is a lot like reading other forms of literature. Some essays are much like short stories because these essays tell stories; they use narrative structures, though the stories these essays narrate are more factual than fictional. Langston Hughes’s “Salvation” and Nora Zeale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” are two noteworthy examples. Narrative essays, such as these, and others, including George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” lay out their ideas explicitly, unlike fictional stories, which work largely by implication and suggestion rather than through direct statement and explanation. Essays can also be like poems in their use of highly charged language, especially figurative language, including imagery, simile, and metaphor. This affiliation, however, is only approximate, as poets typically write about one thing in terms of another, whereas essayists are generally more literal about conveying a sense of their subjects and ideas. Essayists tend to use figurative language to clarify and explain ideas. Their main intent is to explain and persuade. The essay relishes and enshrines thinking. We read essays and write them to discover what others think so we can better see what we think ourselves. We read essays for the intellectual stimulation they provide. We write essays to experience what we think in a recursive, deep-rooted process of slow, playful (and sometimes painful) discovery. The essay genre involves exploration, inquiry, invitation, and provocation toward considered and deliberative thinking.