The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate
This essay collection is one of the few books we are packing into our tiny car for our long term camping trip. The essays start from Seneca, jump around continents, cultures and moments in history. Themes include ambition, death, food, education, marriage, family times, nature, politics. There's a five separate essays on walking which were particularly useful in preparation for our great adventure. If you don't have time to read more than fifty essays here are a few of my favorites.
1. Hateful Things. Sei Shonagon. Read this immediately. Stop everything you are doing and read this immediately. And then everything else she has written. Sei Shonagon was a court lady in tenth-century Japan. Her incredible journals, marked by lists of her judgements and experiences paint an illuminating picture of life in her day. Hateful Things is exactly what it sounds like... and it is incredible.
“One is just about to be told some interesting piece of news when a baby starts crying.
A flight of crows circle about with loud caws.
An admirer has come on a clandestine visit, but a dog catches sight of him and starts barking. One feels like killing the beast.”
2. He and I. Natalia Ginzburg. The experiences that mark Natalia Ginzburg's life are hard to imagine. Her first husband, a leader of the antifascist underground was tortured and killed in 1944. She often published under a pseudonym and supported herself and her children. In this essay, her second husband serves as a model for the connection of two people, profoundly different and interconnected. After reading this essay, I tried to start an essay of my own in this same theme. I have yet to complete it.
“..two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another forever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.”
3. Walking. Henry David Thoreau. Reading Walking felt like a graceful sign that our upcoming journey to "saunter" through the wilderness was the next step we needed to take. It's hard to imagine a step through nature without reflecting on Thoreau.
“So we saunter towrad the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whiole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.”
4. Notes of a Native Son. James Baldwin. This essay opened door into an extremely personal experience, one I should say I have never and can never expect to share, but one that I wish more people would read. An experience of race, an experience of poverty, an experience of being a son.
“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.””