pick★★★★★
An evaluation on and of essays—form, purpose, and impact—that is enriching as that last beautiful poem one had a short encounter but remembers forever. Dillon also writes of his struggles and how reading and writing are ways to cope even when, at times, both are at the roots of the struggles.
Worth a reread for when one wanders.
...the literature of depression, disarray and the decay of ambition.
- “On melancholy“
Protestations of debilitating sloth are common among writers, and more frequent among prolific ones; Boswell and Johnson, for example, had many sympathetic chats about their shared reluctance to get out of bed and down to work.
- “On melancholy“
Pushed to say what I value, what I love, in essays and essayists, I sometimes think it is nothing but style.
[...]
What exactly do I mean, even, by ‘style‘? [...] As much in a person, in a body, as in prose: those people who can keep it together. ‘I like your style‘ means: I admire, dear human, what you have clawed back from sickness and pain and madness. I‘m a fan, too much a fan, of your rising above.
- “On Style“
Writing for me is the serial production of fragments that could be composed in a day or two. I would never have written anything if I had not hit upon this rhythm of invention and completion; it‘s what allows me, and perhaps many other writers too, to keep a killing anxiety at bay.
- “On anxiety“
Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure.
- “On essays and essayists“
pick5 stars. I'm into essays, but this is for sure the most intellectually limber yet companionable and finally moving book of essays I've ever read about the form of the essay. A lucid and personal exploration of why literature matters.
Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction | 
