The Best American Essays 2014 (2 page)

For Montaigne, wisdom was not the product of accumulated knowledge—a convenient set of all the conclusions we've reached in life.
Au contraire:
wisdom instead meant developing the habit of continually and rigorously testing that accumulated knowledge. Some writers and readers today, I'm sure, still endorse Montaigne's radically open-minded disposition, but how many would agree with John Stuart Mill's even more radical way of assessing public opinion? In “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” an essay once well known and respected in academia, Mill famously wrote: “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” Yet we see in the news nearly every day someone censured for “offensive,” “objectionable,” “inappropriate,” “unacceptable,” or “insensitive” remarks. Lately, each spring as I work on this annual foreword, I come across reports of commencement-day speakers who have had their campus invitations rescinded, usually because one group or another is “offended” by a speaker's comments, beliefs, opinions, or affiliations.

And as I write now, I see in the
New York Times
an item on a new college trend, “trigger warnings.” These, the
Times
explains, are “explicit alerts [to students] that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them.” I imagine these “triggers” would be boldly noted in a syllabus, like warnings on a pack of cigarettes. For
Moby-Dick
I see the following:
Caution
:
this classic American novel depicts no women characters, graphically portrays the inhumane treatment of ocean wildlife, and features an obsessive amputee intent only upon pursuing and slaughtering a majestic sperm whale.
Or Henry David Thoreau's
Walden:
Caution: This noted work of nonfiction, though it shows respect for the environment, nevertheless may promote a life of self-reliance and antisocial behavior.
Or Montaigne's
Essais:
Caution: These essays may cause you to think about things you shouldn't, which in turn may result in a disturbing sense of mental disorientation and ideological tolerance.
Potentially upsetting incidents or information, of course, can be encountered not just in literature but in all kinds of reading. In “Someone Else” (
[>]
), Chris Offutt recalls feeling “uneasy” after reading an article in a psychology class about victims of sexual abuse, he having been one of them.

One hopes that “trigger warnings”—however well-intentioned or psychologically prophylactic they might be—don't indicate an American society becoming increasingly censorial and overly protective. I recall, growing up in the Catholic Church, how many educated people used to sneer at the index of forbidden books that “endangered faith and morals.” In my parochial high school the sisters told me that I could not read
The Brothers Karamazov
for a book report (I chose a safer book but sinned and read
Brothers
anyway, and my mind exploded). Will “trigger warnings” simply be a way of establishing a new secular index, a cautionary list of books and other works dangerous not for religious reasons but because they may offend or upset certain groups or individuals or that contain material which can be viewed as insensitive or inappropriate? Would
Grapes of Wrath
be upsetting to someone with bad memories of rural poverty? Will the near future necessitate warning labels in front of all published material? Will future editions of
The Best American Essays,
for example, include a trigger warning in front of each selection so readers can avoid material that might upset them? And will trigger warnings in themselves eventually cause upsetting reactions, just the words and images sufficing to evoke unpleasant memories or anxious responses? Says our impressionable liberal arts student, “Why did you even mention cruelly harpooning sperm whales? Now I can't sleep at night.”

Until the censors control the day, I hope our intrepid readers will enjoy the essays collected here, despite their many unsettling subjects and themes. So, caution: you might feel your skin crawl as you read Leslie Jamison's vivid depiction of a demonic disease; or completely shaken up by what happens in Ariel Levy's hotel room during a Thanksgiving trip to Mongolia; or discomfited by John H. Culver's visit to a Rome emergency room; or distressed by the vicious and systematic sexual abuse Barry Lopez suffered as a child; or wholly on edge with Jerald Walker's tense dialectics of racism; or grossed out by the antics of Wells Towers's unembarrassed old father at a drug-enhanced Nevada festival; or shocked by Kristen Dombek's sexual candor; or disoriented by Lawrence Jackson's dangerous trips through a
Clockwork Orange
–like Baltimore. Also in store are recurring nightmares, obsessive behavior, the fears and anxieties of aging, suicide, and—as they say in those infomercials—a whole lot more.

 

The Best American Essays
features a selection of the year's outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today's essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to The Best American Essays, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116. Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Please note: all submissions must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays to the address above. Because of the increasing number of submissions from online sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date, author contact information, etc.) will no longer be considered.

 

I would like to dedicate this book to a very close friend who died as I was at work on this foreword, Bruce Forer. Bruce and I edited several books together, and he helped me conceptualize this series back in 1985. This will be the first foreword he didn't get a chance to read. As always, I appreciate all the assistance I regularly receive from my editors, Deanne Urmy and Nicole Angeloro. I was fortunate that Liz Duvall once again handled copyediting. I'd like, too, to thank my son Gregory Atwan for calling my attention to a few of the outstanding essays that appear here. It was a great pleasure to work with John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose 2011 essay collection
Pulphead
has helped revitalize the genre and sent the essay spinning in new directions. The prose energy that can be found in
Pulphead
—the way Sullivan brilliantly maintains the momentum of a story while casually slipping surprising information into traditional forms—can also be seen in this impressively diverse collection of essays, one that is simultaneously intense, intellectual, and inventive.

 

R. A.

For Scott Bates, 1923–2013

 

A
BIT OF ETYMOLOGICAL TRIVIA
noted in certain dictionaries is that the word
essayist
showed up in English before it existed in French. We said it first, for some reason, by not just years but a couple of centuries. France could invent the modern essay, but the notion that someone might seize on the production of these fugitive-seeming pieces as a defining mode was too far-fetched to bear naming. Rabelais had written
Pantagruel
, after all, and people hadn't gone around calling themselves Pantagruelists (in fact they had, starting with Rabelais himself, but the word meant someone filled with nonjudgmental joie de vivre). Had a Bordelais born with the name Michel Eyquem titled his books
Essais
in the 1580s? Fine—Montaigne was Montaigne, a mountain in more than name. One didn't presume to perpetuate the role. France will cherish his example, but the influence it exerts there is partly one of intimidation. In France the essay constricts after Montaigne. It turns into something less intimate, more opaque, becoming Descartes's meditations and Pascal's thoughts. It's said that even a century and a half after Montaigne's death, when the marquis d'Argenson subtitled a book with that word,
Essays
, he was shouted down for impertinence. Not a context in which many people would find themselves tempted to self-identify as “essayists.” When the French do finally start using the word, in the early nineteenth century, it's solely in reference to English writers who've taken up the banner, and more specifically to those who write for magazines and newspapers. “The authors of periodical essays,” wrote a French critic in 1834, “or as they're commonly known,
essayists
, represent in English letters a class every bit as distinct as the
Novellieri
in Italy.” A curiosity, then: the essay is French, but essayists are English. What can it mean?

Consider the appearance of the word in English—which is to say the appearance of the word—in the wintertime of late 1609 or early 1610, and most likely January 1610. A comedy is under way before the court of King James I of England, at the Palace of Whitehall in London, or maybe at St. James's Palace, where the prince resides, we're not sure. The theaters have been closed for plague, but there must be diversion for the Christmas season. Ben Jonson has written a new piece,
Epicœne, or The Silent Woman
, for his favored company, the Children of the Whitefriars, boy actors with “unbroken voices,” several of whom have been “pressed”—essentially kidnapped (sometimes literally off the street, while walking home from school)—into service for the theater. For most of them it's an honor to number among the Children of the King's Revels. They enjoy special privileges.

January of 1610: James is forty-three. The biblical translation he has sponsored is all but done. John Donne holds a copy of his first published book,
Pseudo-Martyr
, and gives it to James, hoping in part to flatter him into forgiving past wildnesses. “Of my boldness in this address,” he writes, “I most humbly beseech your Majesty to admit this excuse, that, having observed how much your Majesty has vouchsafed to descend to a conversation with your subjects by way of your books, I also conceived an ambition of ascending to your presence by the same way.” Galileo squints at Jupiter through a telescope he's made and finds moons (he can see them so faintly they look like “little stars”) that evidently obey no gravity but Jupiter's own, proving that not all celestial bodies circle the earth, a triumph for proponents of the still-controversial Copernican theory of heliocentrism, but one suggesting an important modification to it as well, for Copernicus had placed the sun at the center of the world, whereas Galileo was sensing that there might be no center, not one so easily discerned. James receives a dispatch about it from his Venetian ambassador. “I send herewith unto His Majesty the strangest piece of news,” it reads, “that he has ever yet received from any part of the world,” for a “mathematical professor at Padua” had “overthrown all former astronomy.” What is opening is the multiplicity of worlds. Sir Walter Raleigh sits in the Tower writing his
Historie of the World
, begging to be sent back to America, saying he'd rather die there “then to perrish” in a cell. We're at the court of the Virginia Company, which days before has published a pamphlet, a
True and Sincere Declaraccion
, extolling the virtues of the new colony, that “fruitfull land,” and struggling to quiet horrific accounts that are starting to circulate. Across the Atlantic in Jamestown it's what they're calling “this starveing Tyme.” Of roughly five hundred settlers, four hundred and forty die during this winter. Survivors are eating corpses or disappearing into the forest.

James draws our notice here not for being king—not as shorthand for the period, that is—but because he plays a significant if unmentioned part in the evolution of this slippery term and thing, the essay. All his life he has loved learning. We may imagine him as a stuffed robe-and-crown who gives a thumbs-up to the
Authorized Version
and fades into muffled bedchambers, but James was a serious man of letters. He fashioned himself so and was one, in truth. Not good enough, perhaps, to be remembered apart from who he was, but given who he was, better than he needed to be. He held scholarship in high esteem, while himself indulging certain sketchy ideas, among them the power of demons and witches. In his youth, in Edinburgh and at Stirling Castle, he'd been at the center of a loose-knit and blazingly homoerotic band of erudite court poets, dedicated to formal verse and the refinement of the Middle Scots dialect, his native tongue. Most of what King James wrote had to be translated into plain English before being published, but one text—because it took for its subject partly the use of Middle Scots for poetic purposes—got published in the original language. It consisted mainly of poems but contained also, in the most remarked-upon part of the book, a nonfiction “Treatise” of twenty pages, laying out “some reulis and cautelis”—precepts and pitfalls—“to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie.” The title of James's book?
Essayes of a Prentise.