Reality Hunger (43 page)

One of the tricks in writing a personal essay is that you have to develop a dialogue between the parts of yourself that in a way corresponds to the conflict in fiction. You cop to various tendencies, and then you struggle with these tendencies.

Ambitious work doesn’t resolve contradictions in a spurious harmony but instead embodies the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

One view is “There’s something in charge and I wanna get straight with it.” Another view is “There’s something in charge and it means me no good and I wanna get the fuck out of here.” And the third is “There’s nothing and everything going on.” The third, because it contains the other two, is most appealing to me.

doubt

Why bother conducting an experiment at all if you know what results it will yield? Maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental—not an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion but an unmapped quest that has sprung from the word
question
. I don’t know where the journey ends; otherwise, why call this action
journey
?

There is something heroic in the essayist’s gesture of striking out toward the unknown, not only without a map but without certainty that there is anything worthy to be found.

We’re only certain (“certain only”?) about what we don’t understand.

Authenticity comes from a single faithfulness: that to the ambiguity of experience.

Maybe the essay is just a conditional form of literature—less a genre in its own right than an attitude that’s assumed amid another genre, or the means by which other genres speak to one another.

To think with any seriousness is to doubt. Thought is indistinguishable from doubt. To be alive is to be uncertain. I’ll take doubt. The essayist argues with himself, and the essayist argues with the reader. The essay enacts doubt; it embodies it as a genre. The very purpose of the genre is to provide a vehicle for essaying.

The real story isn’t the official story; the real story is my version (wrong, too, but aware that it’s wrong) of the official story.

Not only is life mostly failure, but in one’s failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.