Sunday Essay: On These Essays

The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, June 20^th. It is the 49^th of a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays.

Last week’s essay: On the Dead

We’re rounding the bend on these essays, which is at once a hard thing to believe and, as I’ve just scrolled through photos from weekends how-was-that-four-years-ago, a reminder of things I suppose are always just out of conscious recognition: Time does not move at a constant pace, and it can move at multiple paces at once.

Two of the last three essays were always bound to be of the last essays, and Independence Day falling on the second-to-last Sunday made them two of the last three, and so I realized months ago this would be the fourth—a pause before entering the final chapters. I have a sense this comes often in narratives: A pause above a valley. A quiet night just shy of a day’s journey from home. A penultimacy of some sort. Reflection.

These essays were not as good as I wanted them to be. What is? They are often, when I open them back up months later, not as bad as I fear them to be when I recall rushing them out. Some, I’m proud of. Others are forgettable. Some I finished comfortably and confidently and later than the time I intended. Some I finished with a sense of get-‘em-next-week, ahead of deadline. Many were in between, on each of those axes. There were weeks when the topic was clear and the essay wrote itself. There were essays where I didn’t know what to say and tried to make something that sounded good, even if it said little. Sometimes, a topic seemed clear until I was into it, at which point it was too far to get out without either publishing later than Sunday or doing away with all responsibilities save the essays, neither of which seemed advisable. I had ambitions. I came up short of those ambitions. I had moments where things clicked, things that will stay with me, and I of course had process-centered learnings as well. It became easier to write the essays, then harder, then easier again but not every week. My life’s narrative surrounding the essays was not linear, and progress did not always move in a forward direction. I guess it’s a cousin to time.

I’ve long wanted to do something vaguely of this nature. For a decade and more, the intended form was a journal, with the most notable attempt that trip around the country five summers back, a trip from which I have long ramblings and then long notes and then shorter notes and then no notes at all. I didn’t know what the essays would be when I started to write them, but one possibility I held in mind was the same aim of those journals: an accounting of myself. I considered trying to craft with them a sort of nonlinear autobiography, something I or another interested party could look back on in the future and in so doing know how I saw myself at 25 and 26 (an aside: it’s interesting, when I write those ages, that they feel so young—I realize I often feel older than I am). They are not that autobiography. They are not that account. But they’re a window, and a clearer one than most of this site’s content. I’ll read them again one day, and I wonder how I’ll take them, and in what light and with what specificity I’ll remember what surrounded them. Will I file together my favorites? How large would that file be?

There will be more essays to come, but not in the immediate aftermath of No. 52, on July 11^th. The Essay has been a disproportionate piece of stress these last few months, and I’m relieved to have reached the point where I’m excited to write the next three and to then be done. Again, I’ll be interested to test this with my own reading, but my sense is that the essays have been, generally speaking, weaker of late. The response has been more muted, and perhaps that’s just life revving back up for so many of us, but my internal response has been more muted as well. I hope these last three, and especially those two I always knew would have to be of the last three, will be satisfying to those of you who have read these loyally. So, on that note, thank you for reading them. It has enriched the exercise, and I’ll remember so many of your responses with fondness when looking back at this particular subplot of this particular year.

And now, I rest my eyes, ready for the valley, ready for that not-quite-a-day’s journey home, ready for the final chapter of this particular story. For it’s all a story. All of this is a story. And every story has its end.

Next week’s essay: On My Non-Magnificence