Barry Grass on Christine Hume

I was watching a program on Discovery Channel one day about killer bees. The program was detailing their spread. How their migration, their invasion, of the United States has gone and will go in the future. I probably saw this some fifteen years ago or more. The models that the researchers used indicated that Africanized Honey Bees (the correct name for what is a hybrid species of bee—the European Honey Bee was bred with the much more aggressive African Honey Bee—but is rarely used because the association of violence and aggressiveness with Africa is tricky business in a country like the United States and would actually be more scandalous than just naming the bees after their propensity to murder, a propensity that doesn’t exist as these bees are defensive creatures) would reach all parts of the American southwest by the mid 2000s, and could reach into Missouri, my native Missouri, before 2020.


I’m extremely afraid of bees. Wasps too. Of course, hornets. Anything with a stinger. Irrational fear. The other day I shrieked in a parking lot and walked to an entirely different row of cars than the one mine was parked in and then made a large loop around back to where my car was. Why? Well, there was a wasp on the ground, walking. In the interest of punnery, I make beelines for safety whenever I see things with stingers. Either that or I stand still as death, biding my time til the lil monster grows tired of my scent, my sweat-slicked arms, and flies away. I pull up, muscles tightened, fight or flight responses about to activate, even when I see a carpenter bee, which I know to have no stinger nor any aggressive streak. That’s the problem: I know how silly this fear is. I understand it to be irrational, yet I don’t prevent myself from acting irrationally.


The map that the Discovery Channel used to project the spread of Killer Bees looked like a meteorological pattern. It looked like a warm front, or like a swirl of wind. A storm that was coming to change the barometric pressure, the whole climate even.



Christine Hume’s 2012 (chap)book-length essay, Ventifacts, is about the wind. A long meditation contained in brief lyric bursts of thought or research, separated like the sections in this review are: by whitespace, by air alone. Two lines of whitespace separating different sections and one line separating paragraphs of an individual section (though this technique is rarely used).

A ventifact is a marking or characteristic in an environment that was caused by the wind. Think about a rock face and its well-worn grooves and lines from years and years of air currents travelling over it. This book, then, is the record of how Hume’s life has been shaped and altered and grooved by the wind.


Which is to say, Ventifacts is about Christine Hume’s daughter, whose biggest fear is the wind. Writes Hume, “She stops, shudders, and runs back for the door. It’s finally spring and she refuses to go outside. I have no idea how to help her, she’s not yet three, gripping my leg…with large animals, she’s brave; in the dark, she’s unfazed. But wherever wind touches her, she grows raw nerve” (10). It is a problematic phobia for Hume. As a mother. Kids need to travel places, need to go outside, if only to get to the car. Kids ought to play outside.


The cover of Ventifacts depicts the swirl of winds over the Pacific Ocean:

I can tell because those brown specks towards the top right of the image are the Hawaiian Islands. A caption inside the book explains that the arrows are wind direction and the colors represent differing wind speeds. The image was taken by a NASA satellite in 1978. It’s interesting to think about how satellite images can change over time. How there might be some record over the years of killer bees and normal honeybees; perhaps the killer bees give off a different thermal signature or perhaps there are giant images charting in lines laid over a map their swirling invasion.


“Anticipation—dread—makes her cower at the merest stirrings, and I seize up knowing what comes next: her diva-level belting out against it. In this instant my face mirrors hers: her shriek echoes against the wind. We are analogies hoping to lead ourselves out of passivity. Yet in the land of troubles, every wind is the same. Wind makes us both too permeable and too solid” (32).


You see very quickly into Ventifacts that there is a mirroring going on between mother and daughter. Hume never becomes afraid of the wind, but learns to become uneasy with the knowledge that her daughter, upon exposure, will soon get into a mood. Weather patterns can shift dramatically with no warning, and we learn that so too can the days and plans of Hume and her family. Some of the book’s most intimate moments come from Hume meditating on this mirroring, or simply on the relationship of mother to daughter. Hume will spend entire sections charting the progress of her daughter’s phobia. She will interject her own thinking about the history of wind studies or research into wind in literature with sharp questions, questions that each seem to be a permutation of How can I expose my child to what she fears and still be a good mother? In one of the essay’s most searing sections, she writes, “Is it sadistic not to shelter my daughter? Not to validate the experience of her own feelings? Am I squelching the power of her interior life by rejecting its vivid manifestations? Am I enabling her to develop the wisdom of not believing everything she thinks?” (30). Hume brings us on board with her narrator through these deeply human questions:

Coming at her from every direction, wind is her private terrorist threatening body, home, and family with a huff and a puff. She looks for a place to hide. Wind exposes and inflates instabilities. When she’s in it, she thinks the world makes her flinch. What will it blow away today? What has been accounted for? All things are equal exchange for wind, and we have lost her to the bargain (17).

I feel silly for beginning this review with a mention of my fear of stinging insects. It’s quite easy to avoid them. I can’t think of a single instance where we had to leave a place, where my mom had to bring me to the car and go home, because I saw a bee. Wherefore this fear of mine? Was there some formative experience that I can point to? Not really, no. The earliest memory I have of stinging insects (which because it is the earliest means it is closer to genesis) is of being in my own backyard. Our driveway reached around to the back of the house, where our garage doors were. My dad’s bass boat was too long to be parked in the concrete out back, lest it block the driveway from other cars. So we had a sort of extension built onto the driveway. It was basically a pit of gravel, fenced in with treated wood. Up through the gravel sometimes grew some especially hardy weeds. In this memory, there was clover shooting up through the rocks. The three-leaved kind, though I was searching for that elusive lucky one. Not only did I not find a four-leaf clover, but I got stung in the shoulder by a wasp. There would be no swelling. I am not allergic. But I remember being in considerable pain. I ran inside the house, where my mom treated the wound, which inevitably made it hurt worse for a few seconds that seemed to last for minutes. Maybe that wasn’t the first experience. Maybe I was afraid before then. But whatever the case, I have it easy compared to Christine Hume’s daughter. You can’t very well escape the wind unless you’re inside of a building. Hume and daughter are contained. They are contained inside their home, or they are contained in a larger cell: movements restricted because the wind never stops for good.


I’m thankful that I’ve never been afraid of the wind. Annoyed? Sure. I have long, very fine hair. If I’m in the car and the windows are down, the wind doesn’t blow my hair back. It blows my hair every possible direction, especially the directions that go right into my face. It gets tangled. Ugh. Close the windows, please. Turn on the AC.


That was a lie, of course. I’ve always been afraid of the destructive possibilities of the wind. There was a stretch of time in my life were I would pray each night to Jesus Christ and His Father. When that time had ended, there was one thing that could get me to pray once again, as if no lapse of faith had ever occurred. That thing was the wind. Tornadoes, specifically. I have always been more afraid of tornadoes than bees or wasps or my father or anything in the world. They were the one natural disaster that I always had to be worried about growing up in Missouri. You learn to read all of the signs, you learn when to be cautious and when to understand the normalcy of storm. Be worried when the skies tinge green. Be worried not when there is rain but when there is hail, be worried about updrafts. Learn to look on the news channel’s Doppler radar for hooks or tails on the southwest corner of a storm cell. Don’t be worried at a tornado watch; you’re always under a tornado watch in a west Missouri summer. Be worried about a tornado warning. With a warning comes the sirens. With the sirens always came prayer. My freshman year of college: I was driving back to campus from my hometown. I was in the car of this girl, Stephanie, who I wasn’t close with but we graduated high school together and attended the same college. The storm was so bad that we had literally zero visibility. Everyone on I-29 near St. Joseph, Missouri, was driving about five miles per hour, hoping not to collide with anything. The radio broadcaster said that just beyond the sheets of rain, so thick as to be opaque, was tornadic activity. Stephanie had an aunt in St. Joe not too far from a highway exit. When the rain began to let up we were able to exit off and find her aunt’s house. Call it instinct or Spidey Sense or chalk it up to the vermillion sky, but you could sense the danger. We went to her aunt’s basement and watched the news until the power went out. Maybe I felt a small comfort in that dark basement: no one could really see me as I prayed to God for safety for the first time in years.


What Hume is after in Ventifacts is not immediately clear. She’s not after making readers feel what it’s like to fear the wind, at least not in full. She’s not really after making readers sympathize with her difficulty in raising this child, either. She doesn’t treat these experiences like I just did in the preceding section. This is not memoir. This is not narrative. Only sixteen of Ventifacts’ fifty pages make explicit mention of Hume’s daughter. Only thirty-two percent of the essay is directly about the inspiration and occasion for it. Some of the book of course is lyric writing meant to convey an experience of wind that isn’t that of her daughters. As we all know, a good breeze can be the most welcome thing in the world. There is a beauty in wind, and Hume does well to capture that. She writes, “Wind arouses amorphously, omnisciently. It excites water, skims the skin in little slanting waves. Whatever the sun intensifies, whenever it boils, the wind comes along as its ecstatic relief. Wind is sun cum. Spewing seeds, debris and rays. It is all tentacles, all jellyfish experience; a weathervane theater with hooks and stays” (16).


What makes up much of the remaining pages are facts. Facts conveyed and research done, about wind. Hume uses these facts to different effects. Allow me to quote from page thirty:

I’m in line at the grocery store about ten days after Japan’s massive earthquake-induced nuclear reactor leakage. I have heard Yukio Edano, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary’s words, “With evacuation in place and the ocean-bound wind, we can ensure safety,” but I can’t say I put any stock in them. The woman in front of me puts a white bottle on the conveyor belt: “Potassium iodide,” she volunteers, “protects the thyroid from radiation.” We are both staring at the bottle as she adds, “I heard it on the radio; a recent ocean wind brought it here. The radiation is just now hitting Michigan.”

Now I know I said this book’s chief aim wasn’t narrative, and that what I just quoted from was narrative. A scene. Still, it’s useful to see how Hume can drop knowledge or facts into a scene in order to create a sense of uneasiness or even fear. A narrative section such as this one, even if the narrative is secondary to the strange feeling caused by nouns like “thyroid” and “nuclear reactor” and “potassium iodide,” feels important because so much of the book is non-narrative. Narrative shines in this book through Hume’s careful use of juxtaposition.


For all of my years of being afraid of tornados, even laying eyes on them approaching from a distance, there had never been one that actually hit my town or my neighborhood. That post-Thanksgiving basement shelter my freshman year of college? A tornado never ended up touching down in St. Joseph that night. Through all of the tornado warnings I heard I remained safe. This was perhaps the most convincing argument for God’s existence to a selfish little boy: the causation fallacy that my prayers worked, that God kept me safe. On April 27th, 2011, a fierce EF4 tornado devastated a large part of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I currently live. Millions of dollars in property damage. Dozens of people were killed, more than sixty in all, with perhaps many dozens more deaths of undocumented persons in the Alberta City neighborhood that were never officially counted. My house? Safe. Myself? Safe.


It will interest you to realize that a section of text that I quoted earlier in this review—“Is it sadistic not to shelter my daughter?”—immediately precedes the section I quoted about wind-swept radiation set in a grocery store. There is no smooth segue from penetrating questions about how to be a mother to a scene exposing wind’s unreliability and the paranoia that can come from it. There’s only white space separating these two sections. The white space also connects them: it is Hume’s mind that jumps from meditation to memory.


What comes after the grocery store scene is also revealing as to how Hume’s book works. She follows up the self-probing and the brief scene with the following passage: “Take the shape of music: chimes, bells, Aeolian harp, the natural minor key. All the rushes whisper at once when the wind blows through. Wind is the first music, a soundscape for an ecosystem…” (31). When Hume isn’t straightforward with personal reflection, she’s waxing poetic. So much of this book is lyric-driven examinations of how wind has operated in the minds of people throughout history. Thrown into the lyric meditations are diverse sources such as Laura Riding, painters Jeff Wall and Katsushika Hokusai, sound artist Stephen Vitiello, a Webster’s dictionary from the 1800s, the way that the National Weather Service used to name all tropical storms and hurricanes after women, Virginia Woolf, Pliny the Elder, and many more. Each new fact or thinker or artist exploring the notion of wind enhances and complicates the reader’s understanding of everything in the book. Wind is rendered peaceful, confusing, scary. I was most struck by how Hume could carve a fear of wind into me that works purely on an adult/intellectual level. She writes, with equal use of lyricism and fact, that:

We breathe a military climatology, it’s the leitmotif of terrorism. Instead of traditional body-to-body combat, we re-design, re-assign, resign the air. Designing killer environments for our enemies consolidates the most salient givens of our world: terrorism, design consciousness, and environmental thinking…imagine the U.S. fighting a powerful drug cartel in South America by controlling the target area meteorologically. By engineering wind flow patterns—an air theater, a perfectly orchestrated wind opera – we can engineer vulnerability. (11)

Hume is writing about HAARP, or the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, and she writes about this “military climatology” so effectively that I forget that I had previously known talk of HAARP-driven warfare to be the stuff of kooks and conspiracy theorists.


On conspiracy theory forums (and, increasingly, on YouTube videos that your weird uncle links to on Facebook), there’s many people who, for an area hit by a strong tornado, look back at Doppler radar of the day before the tornado. They show in their posts evidence of “chemtrails” that show up over a city about a day or so prior to a massive storm. These look like abnormal rings on the radar. It is the contention of conspiracy theorists that the HAARP satellites affect the climate in the ionosphere over these cities, causing these chemtrails. That the tornado that leveled Tuscaloosa was a test by the U.S. government, or an act of weather war by China or Russia.


I’m reminded a bit of John McPhee’s Oranges when I read Ventifacts. What seems to always be said about McPhee’s book is something like “Wow! An entire book about oranges!” Hume has written this entire book/essay on wind. Both books are full to the brim with facts and research about their subjects that widen our understanding, that broaden our entire conception of the thing. But there are key differences. McPhee uses his facts and research to establish a cultural history of thinking about the orange. He wants to know everything there is to know about the orange. For Hume, the research seems more personal. There’s more at stake here. Or at least it is personal for Ventifacts’ narrator. Narrator-Hume needs to understand the wind to better understand her daughter, but the more she learns about wind the harder it is to concretize her ideas about it. You don’t walk away from Ventifacts an expert on wind, though you certainly will know a lot more about it than any non-meteorologist or climatologist around you. You walk away from Ventifacts feeling confused and awed by the wind. Whatever inroads Narrator-Hume makes towards understanding are crafted by Author-Hume to bewilder us, to translate to us the feeling of being lost in the depths. This is lyric writing; you feel its impact. Wind as a character and as a subject in this book constantly swirls and shifts from one thing to another. Hume’s brief, lyric sections swirl around too in a highly associative manner and order. This is nonfiction with a poet’s eye for how content and form can bolster each other.


Another lie: I don’t have long hair anymore. I shaved it off two months ago after 13 years. I like my tight buzzcut. I like being able to roll the windows down, being blasted by wind. Each little hair though is extremely sensitive to touch, like hundreds of antennae. If a bee flies near my head, I may not be able to stand still anymore. Or maybe I’ll get over it: the bees, the fear.

I didn’t pray on April 27th, 2011. I did call my mom to tell her I loved her. I was in Gorgas Library, on the campus of the University of Alabama. I was with some classmates and friends and some total strangers, all of us huddled in a side hallway near the music stacks. I don’t remember if I made a deliberate effort not to pray. It’s possible; a test of my anti-faith. I do remember that some of my friends were more scared than I was. While I had grown up with tornadoes as a constant threat and knew exactly the kind of damage that they do, it occurred to me that some of my friends didn’t know precisely how damaging tornadoes could be. Which meant that, in their minds, tornados were even scarier than they actually are. When the movie Twister came out, it put up middling box office numbers in the states where tornadoes are common. But along the coastal cities of the U.S. the film did extraordinarily well. It was an early-summer blockbuster because those Americans didn’t know what tornados could really do. It was plausible to them, the exaggerated breakout of EF5 tornadoes in that flick. I’m not saying my friends in the library had Twister on their minds that April day. I am saying that there’s a phenomenon; that we fear more greatly the things which we are told to fear and that we haven’t been exposed to before ourselves. I didn’t pray that day. Instead, I tried to keep my friends calm. I tried to explain what would be going on outside the thick library walls, how we were surely safe behind them. In the coming weeks—and in the coming years really, when some friends would begin to show signs of post-traumatic stress when the weather forecast mentions the possibility of tornadic activity—I would try to be a figure of experience. I would remind people that where I’m from, towns and families do pick up the pieces, scattered by wind though they may be. People do move on. I tried to be an emotional rock. The thing about rocks, though, is that they don’t hide anything. When the wind carves into them over the years they can’t help but show it.

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Barry Grass is originally from Kansas City, and now lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he has served as Nonfiction Editor for Black Warrior Review. Recent work appears in The Normal School, Hobart, Sonora Review, and Annalemma, among others. Send your cures for bee-fear to barrygrass@gmail.com.

Leia Wilson offers: A List of Stuff I Like & Stuff I Don’t Like: I Don’t Like A lot But I Adore Christmas Because Cloves & Cinnamon & Really Who Hates Christmas Won’t You Play Magic With Me.

“Drain the victim’s blood, sell the corpse, and use the soul on guard duty. No muss, no fuss, no problems.”

–Olivia Voldaren

Olivia Voldaren—one of the hottest, most powerful red black vampires of all time—has it correct: use the whole animal. No sense wasting any meat. The essay should accomplish: selfishness and resourcefulness, the courage to gather its pieces tightly back to you in all their sticky saltiness & rearrange them & eat those pieces & rip the hearts out of foxes & verb them & make them nasty. I used to really dislike that word “nasty.” It’s weird in the mouth, right? It sounds lowly. Ha! Welcome to the classism of words! But now I like nasty a lot. It captures both the “activeness” (the ability of an essay to illicit a response from the reader, to translate & move & affect) and voice (without which invention can’t happen) that I like in nonfiction.

As the nonfiction editor at Black Warrior Review I’m always looking for unrestrained prose when I’m reading. Unrestrained, a bit mad—hectic maybe, but at the same moment quiet & directed. I like honesty in writing. I know—I know that’s such an abstract thing to say and isn’t all nonfiction honest.

Somehow these thoughts on loudness & restraint & sincerity remind me of Chelsea Hodson. Her essay, “Four Cities,” in our upcoming issue, 40.1, is exactly what I mean by honesty. It’s difficult not to love every word of her essay actually, but there’s a moment early on that I think embodies this elusive sincerity. She’s remembering a story she wrote in grade school. She writes “…girl makes friends with bird, bird introduces girl to other bird friends, all birds die from electrocution when girl makes phone call. My mother saves my school worksheets, one of which reads, Loves: dogs, wild animals. Hates: when things die, tomatoes.” Her essay doesn’t stop at merely remembering—it imagines and bleeds and, before I knew it, I was right there bleeding with her.

Our 9^th Annual Black Warrior Review contest recently closed, and I spent part of my Monday morning sending out notification emails to all our sweet & beautiful nonfiction finalists. When I was reading through the submissions for the contest, and when I read submissions for general content, I’m looking for something inventive, both as a reader and editor. I don’t want anybody to remake the wheel or anything so dramatic. I don’t give a fuck about the wheel. The wheel works. Or doesn’t work. Nice for it. So what. I’m also not interested in reading 100 submissions that are exactly the wheel. Because that’s boring.

Ha. Isn’t it lovely how metaphors are so apt at communicating an idea, but at the same time not communicating anything concrete about that idea. I’m going to try hard from here on out to say some concrete things, but I’d like to also say that I’m the current nonfiction editor for BWR, not the eternal nonfiction editor. I might actually like a business card that said eternal something. Eternal Vampire. Eternal Mono Black Except When I’m Red Black. Eternal Grixis. Eternally aggro. Maybe something less awkward than those. Eternally yours. Oh yes, eternally yours. Every editor leaves their mark on the journal. I’m just one BWR editor. I can’t really answer the question of what I’m looking for, exactly, because I like quite random/diverse things, so I’ll just tell you what I like and some of what I don’t. At the same time, BWR is known for its nontraditional prose. We like essays that play with form, that question the boundaries of “essay-ness.” I think regardless of my preferences, quality pokes its head out despite taste. 

I get bored easily. I want an essay to capture me within the first few words. Attention to language, to each word, is important to me as an editor. Beginnings are important too. It probably sounds unfair—to decide upon the quality of the essay so early—but I don’t like words to be taken for granted. I like language to be precise & crisp & wielded appropriately, decisively. I want to be able to hear the sound of the essay as I bite into it. The essays I’ve enjoyed reading most have an engaging tone and voice and sound to them. They’re direct, also confident, also humble.  

I’m interested, both as an editor and reader, in the “something else.” I’m interested in fable and mythology and wonder in nonfiction. I like strange things. Nonfiction’s willingness to imagine—that’s the challenge, how much are you willing to imagine as the writer. I like the risk in that—the permission to imagine, to indulge in the fantastic.   

Part of being an editor is being selfish. You have to know what you like. There’s a difference between stuff-I-like and stuff-I-don’t-like-but-is-obviously-well-crafted—part of my job is recognizing the presence of that distinction, and then getting over myself. My favorite moments are when I get to the end of the well-crafted (but out of the realm of stuff I seek out) essays & think “fuck” or maybe “damn.” There’s an essay like that in our upcoming issue that I’m extremely proud to have within our pages—reading it actually made me cry more than once.

Sometimes as an editor, I have to be able to say “this essay is well written but not to my taste.” I do that a lot. I’m picky. I don’t like a lot of stuff, but I recognize quality. One thing that always catches my eye is when the essay is taken out of the standard/traditional aligned left text. I like the message that sends. Yes, on one hand it says “hey, look at me,” but on the other it also says “hey, look at me.”

O form. O Christmas. O Holiday Joy. I love Christmas the most out of all the other holidays. Halloween can suck it & Thanksgiving is just a giant dinner party to satiate our excitement that Christmas is just a month away. Just a month away. Thanksgiving makes sure that Christmas dinner isn’t a barbarian’s feast, that we’re not all pounding our fists on tables or flipping them. And every August I start wanting Christmas to come along again. The snow the stupid insistent holiday cheer the stupid bells & hats the stupid repetitive upbeat music the crowdedness the hurriedness the smell of cinnamon & ginger & clove.

I adore everything about the mass production of the holiday, the artificiality, the intense devotion to form—hang the stockings, put up the tree, decorate the tree, turn on all the Christmas lights, eat gingerbread and caramel apples. I like that the holiday forces itself upon you, surrounds & suffocates you. Not even the radio will let you breathe—there’s Frosty the Snowman on every station. Isn’t the artificial joy terrifying & awesome. I like nonfiction that is like the holiday. I enjoy the level of devotion or obsession or crowdedness—that’s one of the things that draw me to a piece of nonfiction. I like the attempt at something—the journey of it all, the exploration, the searching.

Playfulness—yes. I’m going to contradict myself again and say that not every essay or nonfiction piece has to mean anything. I like pretty things too. I like the directness of text messages, phone messages, graffiti, billboards, audio, twitter, etc. There’s something interesting about the speed of those things and the places they occupy socially. They’re lively/living. There’s craft and skill in aesthetically inventive—playful—work. There’s consequence in knowing how to manipulate language. There’s consequence in knowing how to manipulate language in order to manipulate your reader. I appreciate that consequence. I welcome the manipulation.

I’m interested in pieces that explore and utilize ritual, which I think is lyric in structure. In building worlds & atmospheres or moods & voices. I’m interested in repetition, in incantation, in the accretion of stuff (and what the stuff looks like all rolled together). Meaning in accretion—meaning through ritual. Julia Cohen’s essay, “I Cannot Name It, It Lives,” does lyrically driven ritualistic work. This is one of my other favorite pieces in issue 40.1. Her piece invokes “object” like a long, lost lover. She makes it corporeal. By the end of her essay, the word “object” has so much force to it. She chants “Object, are you lonely? Are you neutralized? Domestic? Perpendicular to my pose? Object too polite to expose itself.” Her essay is an invocation, but it’s also a love letter.

Kristen LeMay’s essay, “Moods,” does a similar work. The thing I liked about that essay was how restless it felt. It wore the process of her thinking. She continually reevaluates the word “mood,” the idea of mood, explores its history, in language and in culture. There’s a charming impatience to her essay. She directs the reader, or herself—“Wait. I do remember one adjective we used for the mood: seething.  Another: he was heated up.  And boiling.  As if someone else lit the fire. As if all we could do was wait for it to scald or explode.”

I like interruptions in essays. I like how the interruption reflects everyday life.

I like lyric. I think that’s the future of creative nonfiction. The plurality of it is exciting—the hybridity & multi-mediumness is exciting. The line in nonfiction excites me. The space of the essay is no longer on the white page, no longer subjugated to paper, to the 1 or 2 inch margin—fuck paper. So many things you can do with programming & computers & old-fashioned projectors tears up the page. That’s the fire that I’m interested in feeding. What an ironic thing for me to say, since Black Warrior Review is a print journal. But experiences don’t happen in print—print is so static—so that’s its own contradiction I suppose. We do have some pretty amazing stuff online now. If you haven’t you should check out Eric LeMay’s “The Tetris Effect” on our website.

I’ll admit I’m suspicious of the narrative. I think it dulls the lyric. I’m suspicious of prologue, the story everybody knows, the tradition. That stuff is boring. As a reader, writer, and editor I’m cautious/fearful about being boring. The present moment—that’s where the heat is. I look to nonfiction to explore the liminality of experience. I’m interested in the between stuff, the temporal stuff. Again, I speak personally here. I’m suspicious of a lot of stuff. I’m a woman. I’m Samoan. I was dirt poor growing up. We didn’t have a lot of things. Stuff didn’t mean anything. So I like Christmas because everybody is happy at Christmas. You don’t need anything to experience Christmas. Christmas is everywhere outside. It’s important to be suspicious of narrative because anyone can pick that stuff up. Anybody can learn narrative. I said a couple words and I have a narrative—woman, miscellaneously-not-white, poor. Those words don’t really tell you anything about me. They have no effect. They’re boring. I could string together enough memories to cover a few pages—but that’s not an essay. I’ll be straight forward here. I don’t care much for essays that only reconstruct the past. That is one thing that annoys me as an editor. I read quite a bit of strung-together-memories-or-feelings that impersonate essays. I want the essay to do more work than mere memory. 

I’m interested in resisting narrative, but not discarding it. Black Warrior Review has a history of publishing essays that challenge narrative, essays which are interested in pushing beyond nostalgia.  We’re interested in consequence—in lines and sentences and paragraphs that affect the reader. We’re interested in essays that capitalize on the lyric’s strength to invoke feeling immediately (to knock you out with intensity & concision & precision of language) and narrative’s ability to tap into the familiar, to build characters. Part of the reason I love Adeena Reitberger’s essay, “Here Is Always Somewhere Else” is because of its rejection of narrative in its opening lines. She begins: “There were no county fairs. There were no goats or chickens or cows. We never ate funnel cakes or corn dogs or deep-fried Oreo cookies. We didn’t sit in the sun until our noses turned red or stack hay after the harvest or ride to the lake in the back of pick-ups wearing bathing suits.” I’m interested in that dialogue—in the rejection. 

I like an essay that makes me forget I’m reading it, that obscures the process of reading and instead makes me feel and experience. I want to feel everything.

To state the obvious: people want to feel things. One of the hardest things, as a writer, is letting them, is figuring out how to translate your experiences. One of the easiest things, and one of my favorite things about being nonfiction editor, is to feel things. I really appreciate that people are willing to share their experiences with me. Some of the things I read take a lot of courage to say. I respect that difficulty. It’s hard, as an editor too, to make that distinction between courage and craft. It’s rewarding too when you stumble upon an essay that is both. I think that’s what the BWR is all about at the end of the day. It’s sort of romantic, in a strange way. I want to love every piece—I’m willing—but at the same time I want to be charmed—convinced. I want my heart to seize up, my breathing to forget itself—I want it to be nasty. 

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Leia Penina Wilson is currently the nonfiction editor for Black Warrior Review. She can bake cakes. She likes medium and large, very fluffy dogs. She likes cats that way too. And raccoons. And beavers. She plays Magic. She loves vampires. She has long, brown hair. Her book of poems, i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. She might be in love with you.

David Lazar in Conversation with Robert Burton, author of Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), vox es, praeterea nihil

David Lazar: Some of our readers might say they wouldn’t be caught dead reading a thousand-page, seventeenth-century compendium of quotation, essay, digression, and aphorism about the state of our incorporeal infirmities. What might you say to such a reader?

Robert Burton: No go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever thou art, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayest be dejected, how many several ways, by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent, an ague, etc; how many sudden accidents may procure thy ruin, what a small tenure of happiness thou hast in this life, how weak and silly a creature thou art.

DL: Thanks. I’m sure Amazon sales have now reached the torrid zone. Considering the intensity of your achievement, your influence on Johnson, Sterne, Lamb, Keats, so many others, does the fact that you are so little read sting you at all?

RB: A modest man, one that hath grace, a generous spirit, tender of his reputation will be deeply wounded, and so grievously affected with it, that he had rather give myriads of crowns, lose his life, than suffer the least defamation of honour or blot in his good name. And if so be that he cannot avoid it, as a nightingale . . . dies for shame if another bird sing better, he languisheth and pineth away in the anguish of his spirit.

DL: It’s good to hear such a balanced perspective. Within Melancholy are some of the great essays in the English language, the “Digression of Air” (“what God did before the world was made? was He idle?”), and “Artificial Allurements.” Can you speak to the way you assay, how you crafted these bold, wandering Montaignian essays in your swift, barely post-Elizabethan prose?

RB: One must needs scratch where it itches. I was not a little offended with this malady, shall I say my mistress Melancholy, my Egeria, or my malus genius, and for that cause, as he that is stung with a scorpion, I would expel clavum clavo, comfort one sorrow with another, idleness with idleness, ut ex vipera theracum [as an antidote out of a serpent’s venom] make an antidote out of that which was the prime cause of my disease.

DL: So you’re saying that writing is therapeutic? Many writing professors reject that idea.

RB: Cardan professeth he wrote his book de Consolatione after his son’s death, to comfort himself; so did Tully write of the same subject with like intent after his daughter’s departure, if it be his at least, or some imposter’s put out in his name, which Lispsius probably suspects. Concerning myself, I can peradventure affirm with Marius in Sallust, “That which others hear or read of, I felt and practiced myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing. “

I am of Catullus’ opinion, and make the same apology in mine own behalf: I write for the most part to satisfy the taste and judgment of others; I am not mad myself, but I follow those who are. Yet grant that this shows me mad; we have all raved once. And you yourself, I think, dote sometimes, and he, and he, and of course I too . . . Howsoever my lines err, my life is honest.

DL: Point well-taken, and I see you’ve read my work.

RB: I have not offended your chaster ears with anything that is here written, as many French and Italian authors in their modern language of late have done?

DL: I’m from Brooklyn. Moving on, Do you have any new projects planned?

RB: Give me but a little leave, and I will set before your eyes in brief a stipend, vast, infinite ocean of incredible madness and folly: a sea full of shelves and rocks, sands, gulfs, euripes and contrary tides, full of fearful monster, uncouth shapes, roaring waves, tempests, and siren calms, halcyonian seas, unspeakable misery, such comedies and tragedies, such absurd and ridiculous, feral and lamentable fits, that I know not whether they are more to be pitied or derided, or may be believed, but that we daily see the same still practiced in our days, fresh examples, nova novitia, fresh objects of misery and madness in this kind that are still represented to us, abroad, at home, in the midst of us, in our bosoms.

DL: Sounds great. Almost like Anatomy II. There was a rumor floating around that you hanged yourself. Comment?

RB: Corpora cito extinguuntur.

DL: Isn’t that a somewhat coy response?

RB: Do you wish to be freed from doubt? do you desire to escape uncertainty?

*

David Lazar’s books include Occasional Desire (University of Nebraska Press), The Body of Brooklyn and Truth in Nonfiction (both Iowa), Powder Town (Pecan Grove), Michael Powell: Interviews and Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher (both Mississippi). Forthcoming is Essaying the Essay (Welcome Table Press) and After Montaigne, co-edited with Patrick Madden (University of Georgia Press). He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika, now in its thirteenth year, which has featured groundbreaking issues in transgeneric writing and the aphorism. He teaches at Columbia College Chicago.

Prose Matters

When I teach nonfiction writing, I tell my students that an essay needs to have something that it’s about; that it’s better if takes the form of a story; and that a good first question to ask oneself is: What makes me a good teller of this tale? A lot of what I believe as an editor comes out in these classes, and a couple of years ago a student of mine, an experienced journalist and a wonderful writer who had taken the class in order to experiment with form, did me a tremendous service. He made notes of all my observations—my exhortations, my admonishments—and at the end of the class he printed them all out and gave them back to me.

It was a remarkable gift. I have almost never tried to codify my views on writing. After more than twenty years of editing and a dozen teaching, I just trust in my reactions to the work. But, of course, there is a philosophy behind what I tell my students, and it is essentially the same as the philosophy that animates my editorial decisions at Harvard Review.

I believe, for example, that nothing should terrify a writer more than the prospect of being boring; that writers should aim for something bigger than an essay about themselves; that obscurity is not a virtue; that simplicity is; that emotional honesty is important but that confession is distasteful; that the single most important thing about a piece of writing is the quality of the prose.

This last point is worth emphasizing because not every editor feels this way. Many years ago, I had an exchange on this subject that I’ve never forgotten. At the time I was the editor of another literary magazine and I was having a conversation with a professor who was a member of the board. We were talking about the kinds of work that we considered worth publishing and he said that it didn’t so much matter to him how a thing was written, what mattered was what it said. “That’s funny,” I told him. “Because that’s exactly the opposite of how I feel. I don’t care what a piece is about. To me, what really matters is the prose.”

Of course, it’s not really true that I don’t care about content. But what I meant was that I don’t judge work based on its subject matter. I am not looking for pieces that make certain points or take certain positions or express certain views. I am not, essentially, interested in the political angle. What I am interested in is artistry, that is, an author’s demonstration of mastery of his craft.

I like writing, for example, that shows evidence of control. I like to feel that an author has made conscious decisions, has considered the weight and heft of his own writing, has toyed with his sentences and read them aloud. I like writing that’s witty and playful. I have a soft spot for erudition but not for self-regard. I often like writing that’s unpretentious: it doesn’t always have to sing, sometimes clean and clear is exactly what’s called for. On the other hand, it’s always exciting to come across something that sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard.

It’s actually impossible to define good writing in the abstract since it comes in so many different forms—which is why, when editors are asked what they are looking for, they throw their hands up in despair. The best tactic is always to give examples. So, here are a couple of opening paragraphs from essays published in Harvard Review that illustrate some of the qualities I look for.

The first, from an essay called “Manatees” by Patricia Vigderman, appeared in HR 26 in 2004. What I particularly admire about this lovely, unhurried opening is the way it perfectly mimics the action of the gently bubbling water and the slow-moving creatures.

By late January the manatees have swum up the St. John’s River to a warm spring in central Florida. A ring of such springs comes up from the vast Florida aquifer, rising at the edges of an uneven circle around the limestone under the land between Daytona and Gainesville. The place where the water comes up is called “the boil,” as if the heat and rumble of the earth’s core had forced it up against gravity. In fact, it’s a very gentle motion, a quiet flowing movement, transparent water spreading out into a strong current, so clear that the algae living beneath it turn the whole stream a brilliant, glowing green, and the submerged manatees become great, quiet green blimps until they rise slowly to the surface. Then their gray, leathery skins make apparent the patterning of sunlight on the water’s surface, a wide net constantly in motion. The unruffled beast ruffles the surface briefly with its rudimentary snout, breathing and then sinking down into green again.

A deft and graceful stylist, Vigderman exemplifies for me the idea of a writer with a perfect ear. But there are many kinds of wonderful. For a completely different effect, consider the opening of an essay called “Unprepared” by Jerald Walker, which appeared in 2010 in HR 39 (and was reprinted in Best American Essays 2011), and which contains a line so unexpected that it made me laugh out loud in the line at Starbucks where I happened to be standing when I read it for the first time.

We drove cautiously through the downpour, making the kind of small talk one would expect of strangers, when my companion slid a jacket from his lap, exposing his penis. It rose up high through his zipper, like a single meerkat surveying the land for trouble. To be sure, there was trouble to be had because, despite being a skinny seventeen-year-old, I never left home without my razor.

Walker’s essay is about cultural attitudes toward mass murder and also, to some extent, about race. It is not only wonderfully well written—direct, funny, confident, and slightly understated where it could so easily have gone over the top—it also does something at a structural level that I greatly admire, which is to move fluidly back and forth between narrative and exposition.

What I really like—what I’m always looking for—is writers who know what they’re doing. This is not necessarily the same as those who have been writing a long time, though, to be sure, practice helps. The real difference, I think, is between those who see writing simply as a means of communicating something they feel needs to be said, and those who see writing as an art form. While there is certainly a place in the world for the former, it is not Harvard Review. Harvard Review is for people who are trying to create something and who see words as the medium in which they work. This notion, which would be completely self-evident to any poet, holds just as true for writers of essays. In fact, I am increasingly inclined to see the essay as a kind of poem—just one with an explicit argument composed in unbroken lines.

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of the memoir Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All.

Instability and the Essay, or: Why I Love the “Dialogue of Pessimism”

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)

In the Babylonian “Dialogue of Pessimism,” c. 1000 BCE, a master suggests an activity to his slave, the slave heartily agrees, the master changes his mind, and the slave again agrees. This pattern repeats itself in nine dialogues, with a shift in the tenth and last. While “Dialogue of Pessimism” may seem to be a dialogue between master and slave, then, it is in fact a dialogue between the master and himself. Every idea the master has is echoed by the slave in such a way that, except in the final section, the master changes his mind. This is why “Dialogue of Pessimism” is such a pleasing example of the essay to those of us working in the form today: because it shows a mind in conversation with itself, a mind whose two opposing ideas must jockey for preeminence.

An anachronistic interpretation might even take “Dialogue of Pessimism” for a parable about writing: the slave is the master’s page, reflecting back his every whim with unexpected force and vigor. The slave’s echo instigates the master’s doubt, just as the act of writing so often results in changing one’s mind. The successful essay will capture this mind-change in print, as “Dialogue of Pessimism” does.

The dialogue thus takes place also between master-and-slave and master-and-slave: for example between “I feel like causing some trouble, what do you say?” “I like the sound of that, sir. By all means, let’s wreak some havoc!” and its opposite, “But evildoing’s not very proper, is it?” “Well they either end up killed, or flayed alive and blinded … no, it’s really not worth doing” (section five). And the pleasure of this doubled or tripled dialogue—master/slave, master/master, or master-slave/master-slave—the way it becomes a dialogue between dialogues, at once all and none of these possibilities—is where my real excitement about this essay lies.

Often when we think of nonfiction—I use the term deliberately here to mean that which resists falsehood—we think of a search for stable meaning. Certainly when I was in college, writing an undergraduate thesis about how autobiographical fiction would always make better autobiography than earnest nonfiction, this was how I perceived it. Static meaning, I knew, was impossible, and antithetical to the act of writing itself. Putting words into print may seem to freeze them for perpetuity, but in fact their meaning will change infinitely over time—so the very idea of nonfiction, as I then understood it, was founded on the fundamental falsehood that one’s intended meaning might be fixed permanently to the page.

Later, I’d encounter in Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of monologism and dialogism another expression of what I took to be the same idea: the multiply-voiced novel, precisely because it avoided the authority of a single voice or view, could approach truth more effectively than the story that used a single voice or vision throughout. I continued to believe that, by refusing to moralize or deduce explicit meaning from its own story, fiction could come closer to truth than nonfiction could. But Bakhtin’s framing of the matter helped me understand that old idea in a new way. Now, I understood that there were two types of fiction, monologic and polyphonic, and in my mind these categories corresponded to two types of meaning-making: static writing, which aimed to present a unified, unchanging meaning; and dynamic writing, where any meaning lay in the tension between a multiplicity of voices—somewhere off the page, in the mind of the reader.

What now seems so obvious—that nonfiction, too, can be categorized this way—didn’t occur to me until sometime around my first encounter with “Dialogue of Pessimism.” Here, as in the ideal of the dynamic novel, the essay’s meaning lies between its voices. Even better, the in-between space, like the voices themselves, refuses to be easily defined. Does the essay’s central tension—the thing that holds it together and keeps us reading on—lie between the master and slave, or between the master and himself? Is the slave’s response to the master a true reply, or only a kind of crescendo? Do the demarcations of “master” and “slave” even make sense here, when with his words the slave seems to exert such power over poor, suggestible mister master?

These instabilities delight me in a way that I once believed only fiction could. And though it’s probably important to note that this essay would not have been composed as or interpreted as “nonfiction” in its day, its truth-seeking is clear from both the aphoristic nature of its content (“He who has children secures his name in the future”; “He who starts a family ends up ruining his house”) and the punch of its conclusion. That tenth section’s break with the essay’s established pattern and its final words—“You agree with me, then? Lower your neck for me, slave, and I’ll put us both out of our miseries”; “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. But may I first say, sir: I am not as miserable as you”—suggest some moral, or meaning, to the dance of absurdity that has brought the reader to this point. Unlike in the previous sections, here the master sticks to his original idea, even after hearing the slave’s reply, and the slave achieves the direct impudence that his heightened repetitions of the master’s ideas have been threatening all along. Our contemporary reading of this as an essay is justified, then, even if no discrete meaning, in these final lines, can be named. Even if—as in all good literature—the essay’s meaning is left to interpretation.

The distinction between fiction and nonfiction is one sometimes structured around action and reflection: the action of fiction which, taken alone, offers no definite meaning, versus the reflection of nonfiction, which interprets and so makes seemingly definite meaning of the actions it observes. Just as dialogue is a form of action, though, in which two characters appease, conspire, or contend with each other, so too is reflection a kind of action, as unstable and open to interpretation as any struggle between selves. The best essays, like “Dialogue of Pessimism,” will enact this uneasy work of reflection, perhaps the most common and most human act of all.

All quotations from Emily Dimasi’s translation of “Dialogue of Pessimism” by Ennatum of Akkad, published in John D’Agata’s Lost Origins of the Essay, Graywolf Press, 2009.

Helen Rubinstein is an MFA student at the University of Iowa.

Distorted, Misascribed, and Reworked: Form and Intent in Diogenes’ and Heraclitus’ “Aphorisms”

When we read aphorisms, we are looking for the kind of certitude that a definition is supposed to contain (the word is derived in part from the Greek “aphorismos,” which means “definition”). When we consult a dictionary, we are looking, in a sense, for a last word, and that, too, is the kind of authority we are looking for when we read aphorisms.

In American culture, we tend to associate aphorisms more with kitsch than with literature. We find aphorisms on bumper stickers (see David Shields’ “Life Story,” an essay composed of the sayings on these stickers), embroidered pillows, coffee mugs, and calendars. And yet in spite of their easily mockable commercial applications, aphorisms persist for the uncomplicated fact that they teach us something, and the pithiness of aphorisms is essential to both their interest and their effectiveness. An author’s use of just a few words to say something major lends them an authority perhaps only shared by authors who make use of thousands of pages to do the same (Lev Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, David Foster Wallace).

My introduction to Heraclitus and Diogenes was in the form of aphorism. Diogenes’ tend toward the sharply witty (“In the rich man’s house there is no place to spit but in his face”), particularly his jabs at Plato (“Share a dish of dried figs with Plato and he will take them all”), while Heraclitus’ are philosophical in a way that’s broadly recognizable to the modern reader (“The same road goes both up and down”).

Contrast Diogenes’ more concrete aphorisms:

The darkest place in the tavern is the most conspicuous.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

To live is not itself an evil, as has been claimed, but to lead a worthless life is.

with Heraclitus’, which dispense with metaphor entirely:

Change alone unchanges.

Knowledge is not intelligence.

Those who wish to know about the world must learn about it in details.

I can be hesitant to seek out context for literature—I am divided, perpetually, as to whether historical background and particularly authorial intent should be relevant to my reading at all; as a writer, I very much want to it to be, but as a reader not so much. Because of this, for years, these were the terms by which I read Diogenes and Heraclitus and other authors of wisdom literature: as practitioners of the pithy, as wordsmiths so wise they required just a sentence to say what many of us endeavor to say in many pages.

It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth reading of their texts that I learned that I was not reading Heraclitus and Diogenes in the form in which they intended. In fact, the lines I read as aphorisms were just fragments of their work that had survived through quotations in others writers’ books, rather than complete excerpts from their own. Not only are we not reading these authors in the form they were intended, we may not even know the form in which they were intended to be read. As Guy Davenport, translator of both authors writes, “All of Diogenes’ writings are lost […] What remains are his comments passed down through folklore to be recorded by various writers. These obviously have been distorted, misascribed, and reworked.”

Despite or maybe because of my indecision about the importance of context, I was surprised by how unsettled I felt by this revelation—why did I feel unsettled, and did that discomfort stem from my role as a reader, or as a writer? As a reader, I was immediately curious about the original context of the lines I’d read so many times, and also wondered if knowledge of it might make me less invested in this work—the conciseness of an aphorism is most of what gives it power, and without that, would these sentences be so moving? I tried to imagine what kind of “cushioning” the aphoristic lines might have been accompanied by: was Diogenes’ “They laugh at me, but I’m not laughed at” not in fact a generalized lesson but instead the concluding line to a very concrete personal anecdote? What if Heraclitus’ “Lightning is the lord of everything” was not a striking commentary on the universe but instead just a melodramatic description of the weather? That my mind immediately went to these hyperbolic examples demonstrates, if in an extreme way, both how much context affects our readings, and also the precise nature of my reaction: what I felt, as a reader robbed of context, was deceived.

And as a writer? Is there a greater fear than your work being “distorted, misascribed, and reworked”? To subject my writing to just that treatment, and to give an essay of mine an aphoristic-like rendering, I went through a few paragraphs of my own and removed all concrete descriptions, details, and actions, leaving behind only the single-sentence summaries I imagined (preposterously) might be the ones to hang on through history. What remained were the bare essentials, the succinctness of which lent a conviction to my observations that my usual, adjective-laden narrative voice undermines. And yet the result made my writing nearly unrecognizable, even to me.

It is impossible to write and not be aware of the fact that as a writers we cannot control how we are read—in workshop and in unexpected responses from other readers in the world beyond—but it is rare, I think, to discuss the ways in which we can’t even control the form our work will take after we are gone. Methods for archiving are better than they were between 300 and 500 BC, during the time of Heraclitus and Diogenes—but the truth is that we don’t yet know what our technological means will end up preserving and how (certainly, the context-optional nature of the internet lends itself to archiving that may "distort"). Perhaps those of us who both seek and fear context can take some comfort in a line of contemporary aphorist E.M. Cioran: “No one approaches the condition of a sage if he has not had the good luck to be forgotten in his lifetime.”

Translations of Diogenes and Heraclitus by Guy Davenport.

Lucy Morris is a student in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program and previously worked as a translator.

On the strange brevity of Montaigne's "Of Thumbs"

The first strange thing about Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Thumbs” is that it reads like a Montaigne essay's worth of historical references, but instead of the quotations from Martial and Horace coming couched in between the author’s own anecdotes, reflections, and arguments, the whole thing is condensed to such a degree that the references are the essay. From Tacitus in the first line to Lacedaemon in the last, the piece is really just a series of notes on the symbolism and history of thumbs in the classical world, six short, bursting paragraphs of examples of the human thumb in law, war, and language:

The doctors say that the thumbs are the master fingers of the hand and that their etymology in Latin is from pollere. The Greeks call it Aντιχєιρ, as though to say “another hand.” And it seems that sometimes the Latins also take it in the sense of the entire hand:

                        But not excited by the gentle voice,

                        Nor summoned by the soft thumb, does it rise

                                                                                                MARTIAL

            It was a sign of favor in Rome to close in and hold down the thumbs —

                        Your partisan with both his thumbs will praise your game

                                                                                                HORACE

— and of disfavor to raise them and turn them outward:

                                    When the people’s thumb turns up,

                        They will kill their man to please them.

                                                                                                JUVENAL

There are no interjections of Montaigne’s own opinions about thumbs and their best uses, and certainly no Montaignian digressions about kidney stones, morality, or sleeping habits. The essay is, essentially, a list. There is no connective tissue, which gives it, as a piece of writing, a great sense of pace and a kind of limited depth of field. And like any list, its meaning comes first from the arrangement and juxtaposition of the items it contains. “Of Thumbs” is brief but concentrated, finding room in its scant 350 words for accounts of Roman citizens who cut off their thumbs to avoid military service (apparently the blighty wound of its day), for “barbarian kings” who sealed deals by pricking each other’s thumbs and sucking the other’s blood, and for Greek schoolmasters who bit their students’ thumbs as physical punishment. The examples function kind of like images in a montage, and, after giving a couple sentences of etymology, the images Montaigne selects to focus on become increasingly bloody and specific and human: the knight who “maliciously” cut off his young sons’ thumbs, the gladiators who lived and died by the crowd’s thumb signals, the Aeginetan prisoners of war whose thumbs were severed by their captors so that they could not raise arms again in future. In Montaigne’s juxtaposition of these facts, he makes a case for the thumb as both an instrument of war and a symbol of human frailty, our other Achilles heel.

The essay takes a turn in the second to last paragraph. For the first and only time, Montaigne himself appears, speaking in the first person. “Someone,” he writes, “I don’t remember who, having won a naval battle, had the thumbs of his vanquished enemies cut off.” Someone, I don’t remember who. This is the only time Montaigne addresses us as I. The only time in the essay that the essayist sees fit to remind the reader that he himself is a presence in the piece — that all these images and examples of thumbs were written and revised and ordered by an author, that an essay is always filtered through a human mind — is when he is telling us not what he does know, but what he doesn’t. In this whole piece, Montaigne only makes his presence known in an expression of doubt. (Which is perhaps typical.) Then, suddenly, he comes up with another example, another item for the list, and leaves the stage. It’s an abrupt ending, but its lack of resolution has a certain elegance.

A little bit like a stoner who has spent so long staring at her own hands that she’s only just noticing how weird thumbs are, if you really think about them, I feel like I see thumbs in a new way having looked at them through Montaigne’s eyes. Homo sapiens have more thumb dexterity than any other primate — the pads of our thumbs can touch the pads of any other one of the hand’s fingers, even the pinkie — and this adaptation makes possible so many human activities. Including war, but also writing. Reading Montaigne, I am glad to live in an age where fathers no longer cut off their sons’ thumbs to save them from the draft.

The very brevity and compactness of “Of Thumbs” help to give the reader a sense of Montaigne’s mind in action as he contemplates our first digit. He looks at a mundane part of the human anatomy, and he sees something that contains hidden significance and historical and cultural resonance. This point of view, typical of Montaigne, has a sort of leveling effect across the essays that comprise his oeuvre: he understands the humble thumb as being as worthy of contemplation as his other topics, like education, repentance, the relationship between age and wisdom, and the nature of cowardice. And the essay he gives us has a disjointed quality that is perhaps more revelatory of the feeling of a mind at work, turning over the thumb and studying all of its areas of significance, than some of Montaigne’s longer essays. Someone, I don’t remember who. We feel more keenly in “Of Thumbs” the sense that this is a portrait of a line of inquiry as it is taking shape, and one of the essay’s great joys is that the author chose to preserve that sensation and transfer it so seemingly directly to the reader.

*

Jenna Sauers is a student in the University of Iowa's nonfiction M.F.A. program. Previously working as a journalist, her work has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, The Village Voice, Bookforum, and the New York Observer, and she was a longtime blogger at Jezebel.