Renée E. D’Aoust: Regarding The Best American Essays 2003

I am a first-generation American, and I live in Switzerland, a country where people of color are routinely interrogated by border guards when riding the train across the Swiss-Italian border. The guards walk through the train car, and they rarely question me, a white, middle-aged woman. If you are any color other than white, chances are you will be questioned.

I originally called this piece Notable Quotations from The Best American Essays 2003, because I planned to pick out pithy wisdom from guest editor Anne Fadiman’s choices, quotations telescoping what we’ve lost and learned since 2003. But there’s more to say than a mere list: in this volume, Fadiman champions hefty personal essays that make personal and worldly collisions strikingly clear.

Because of the terrorist attacks across La Ville Lumière on November 13th, Paris is on my mind. It feels like synchronicity that there are three essays in The Best American Essays 2003 (BAE2003) focusing on Paris.

• In “The Debacle,” Francine du Plessix Gray writes: “As my mother and I left Paris on the glorious sunny morning of June 10, 1940, four days before the Germans took the city, we became part of a panic-stricken caravan whose surreal mayhem still haunts me.”
• In “Swann Song,” Judith Thurman honors the retirement of Yves Saint Laurent, sharing that in David “Teboul’s made-for-television hagiography,” shown first at the Centre Pompidou, “The ash grows longer on the master’s [Saint Laurent’s] cigarette as he labors over his sketchpad. His French bulldog, Moujik, dismembers a stuffed toy.”
• In “F.P.,” Myra Jehlen writes that her “friend, who had been born on the left bank of the Seine and never considered living anywhere else, imagined herself dead becoming part of the places that alive she would only consider visiting, as if in her life she’d rehearsed leaving and then in death gone and done it."

At first, I thought BAE2003 wasn’t a particularly timely collection, that it didn’t engage the whole wide world in ways I find urgent and necessary. The essays chosen by Fadiman would have been published in 2002, and as such, I expected to find more of them wrestling with the events of September 11, 2001. I expected to find more sense of the drumbeat to the Iraq war, as a diversion from the Afghanistan war, a shift that palpably occurred in America in the fall of 2002 and on into March 2003 when the bombing of Baghdad started. But then I looked more closely at the anthology, and I further changed my mind as I zeroed in on John Edgar Wideman’s essayistic reflections, “Whose War.” Wideman struggles to explain why anyone “would want to throw more words on a pile so high the thing to be written about has disappeared.” Bingo. How do we articulate fear? Wideman continues:

[A]ll writing pretends to be something it’s not, something it can’t be: something or someone other, but sooner or later the writing will be snuffed back into its jug, back where I am, a writer a step, maybe two, behind my lemming words scuffling over the edge of the abyss. 

I’m sorry. I’m an American of African descent, and I can’t applaud my president for doing unto foreign others what he’s inflicted on me and mine. Even if he calls it ole-time religion. Even if he tells me all good Americans have nothing to fear but fear itself and promises he’s gonna ride over there and kick fear’s ass real good, so I don’t need to worry about anything, just let him handle it his way, relax and enjoy the show on TV, pay attention to each breath I take and be careful whose letters I open and listen up for the high alerts from the high-alert guy and gwan and do something nice for a Muslim neighbor this week.

I wish Wideman didn’t include that apology; we should not require him to apologize for state-sanctioned violence. Our president “kick[ed] fear’s ass real good,” didn’t he? The current mess in the Middle East started with the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others from that administration. My Italian mother-in-law tells me that America is responsible for all the madness in the world, and it is beyond my Italian-language skill set to both agree and disagree. I carry the blue passport of the United States of America; I see violence all around me. When I read John Edgar Wideman’s “Whose War,” I find myself agreeing more than not with my mother-in-law. While reading the entire anthology and this essay particularly, which ends the collection, I hold a complicated set of perspectives and privileges: the knowledge that my husband regularly travels to Paris for business meetings; the knowledge that I am living a life of privilege I never imagined; the knowledge that I have always lived a life of white privilege; and the knowledge that reading the voices of others helps me to find my ethical voice. Here is another quote from Wideman:

Like all my fellow countrymen and –women, even the ones who won’t admit it, the ones who choose to think of themselves as not implicated, who maintain what James Baldwin called “a willed innocence,” even the ones just off boats from Russia, Dominica, Thailand, Ireland, I am an heir to centuries of legal apartheid and must negotiate daily, with just about every step I take, the foul muck of unfulfilled promises, the apparent and not so apparent effects of racism that continue to plague America (and, do I need to add, plague the rest of the Alliance as well).

From my vantage point across the Atlantic Ocean, my country of origin looks full of “complicated muck.” But it’s also uncomplicated to make a commitment to wake up from Baldwin’s “willed innocence,” to affirm Wideman as he urges us to “negotiate daily… the foul muck of unfulfilled promises.” Even on Swiss soil, I must “negotiate daily” the aftermath of American power and militarism. After each new death in America—all the deaths in America—I say to my husband: “It looks like gun violence and terrorism all over the place there.” My husband, an Italian citizen, answers: “And here we are in Europe on a continent that only seventy years ago was riddled with bullets and burning flesh.”

By chance in June 2011, I tagged along to one of my husband’s engineering conferences. I happened to be sitting on a beach on Favignana, a small island off the coast of Italy, when NATO bombers flew overhead. Many took off from nearby Trapani, flying toward Libya. I had gut-wrenching disorientation, vertigo underscored by sweetness. My focus that week was to try every flavor of gelato available at what I had determined was the best shop on the island. At noon, I was eating my first ice cream cone of the day, and the roar shook my eardrums first and then my gut core. I identified an F-16 coursing through the horrible blue sky toward the south.

“I’m an American,” I thought, “of course, I know how to identify a bomber.”

Each day that week, as I counted my ice cream cones and flavors, I counted the bombers. I saw AWACS, “airborne warning and control aircraft systems,” meant to monitor the ground situation in Libya. Favignana is four miles west of Sicily and approximately 350 miles north of Tripoli. Each night that week, I verified the accuracy of my bomber count by reading the BBC.

On Favignana, I was sitting on the edge of what would become the cemetery of Europe, at the obliterated line between impossibility and possibility, at the specious time between death and survival. I licked my pistacchio cone—still my favorite flavor—and I did not feel Baldwin’s “willed innocence,” so much as I felt inadequate in every conceivable way.

When I read about acts of terror in the world news, particularly grim acts of terror in the United States, performed with guns and perpetrated on sacred spaces meant for faith and education (does it even need to be argued that school shootings are terrorism?), I turn to Adam Gopnik. This year, I turned to Gopnik after #JeSuisCharlie (January), after the Charleston massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (June), after the Paris attacks (November).

In BAE2003, Gopnik does not write of violence, though. He shares a piece about his daughter’s “imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli.” The essay “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli” is about how friends are made visible, about loving New York City, a place where plans with friends are made and broken, and about how “busyness is our art form, our civic ritual, our way of being us.”

Elaine Scarry and Susan Sontag and Cheryl Strayed all have work in BAE2003, dealing respectively with 9-11, war, and “The Love of My Life.” The latter is an essay many readers will know because it forms the foundation of Strayed’s memoir “Wild”:

Dying is not your girlfriend moving to Ohio. Grief is not the day after your neighbor’s funeral, when you felt extremely blue. It is impolite to make this distinction. We act as if all losses are equal. It is un-American to behave otherwise: we live in a democracy of sorrow. Every emotion felt is validated and judged to be as true as any other.

Strayed writes, “I was bereft, in agony, destroyed over [my mother’s] death.” Think of that destruction for all those who lost loved ones this past week alone.

So here we are more than a decade after our president ran a gung-ho fiasco into the Middle East. In 2011, my husband was two blocks away from a failed pipe bomb explosion in Stockholm, Sweden. He happened to be having coffee with my first boyfriend, Hjalmar, a former Swedish exchange student, who attended my high school for a year on a small island in Puget Sound back in the Eighties. Today, November 21, 2015, it is nine days after the bombings in Beirut, eight days after the bombings in Paris, and one day after gunman took 170 people hostage in Mali. I still feel inadequate in my personal relation to world events, a sense of dread combined with grim mystery.

I was wrong to assume that BAE2003 does not engage the world; it certainly does not showcase an all-too-typical American blind spot even in our post-9/11 world. John Edgar Wideman writes that “the lives lost [on September 11, 2001] mirror our own fragility and vulnerability, our unpredictable passage through the mysterious flow of time that eternally surrounds us, buoys us, drowns us.”

And now, after a weekend away, my husband and I have just driven across the border from Italy back into Switzerland. The Swiss border guards were standing there with bulletproof vests on and machine guns at the ready, checking people leaving Switzerland (not entering). At the foothills of the Alps, we have palm trees and fir trees. Tonight, the moon is a rowboat.

I enter our home and touch the validated entry ticket to the Eiffel Tower. My husband was there—two months ago.

Renée E. D’Aoust’s Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press) was a Foreword Reviews "Book of the Year" finalist (memoir category). Forthcoming and recent publications include Brevity, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rain Taxi, Sweet, and Trestle Creek Review. She is an AWP “Writer to Writer” mentor and managing editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. D’Aoust teaches online at North Idaho College and Casper College, and she lives in Idaho and Switzerland. Follow her @idahobuzzy and visit www.reneedaoust.com.

Works Cited:

du Plessix Gray, Francine. “The Debacle.” Fadiman and Atwan 112-24.

Fadiman, Anne, and Robert Atwan, eds. The Best American Essays 2003. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Print.

Gopnik, Adam. “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli.” Fadiman and Atwan 103-11.

---. “Charleston, and the Next Time.” NewYorker.com. The New Yorker, 23 June 2015. Web. 22 Nov. 2015.

---. “A Massacre in Paris.” NewYorker.com. The New Yorker, 19 January 2015. Web. 22 Nov. 2015.

---. “Terror Strikes in Paris.” NewYorker.com. The New Yorker, 14 Nov. 2015. Web. 22 Nov. 2015.

Jehlen, Myra. “F.P.” Fadiman and Atwan 136-45.

Scarry, Elaine. “Citizenship in Emergency.” Fadiman and Atwan 223-42.

Sontag, Susan. “Looking at War.” Fadiman and Atwan 243-73.

Strayed, Cheryl. “The Love of My Life.” Fadiman and Atwan 291-307.

Thurman, Judith. “Swann Song.” Fadiman and Atwan 308-19.

Wideman, John Edgar. “Whose War.” Fadiman and Atwan 320-28.

BAE 2004 with John Proctor

I’m 42 years old, and have considered myself a writer since—well, since I could write. As an essayist, though, I’m really still a baby. When I decided five or so years ago to start calling myself one, I determined to figure out what the word “essay” entailed. Long story short—this review isn’t about me, after all—part of this fieldwork was reading each volume of The Best American Essays, beginning with 2010 and working my way backward (and forward since then) and writing my reactions to each essay—summarizing content, noting what it did formally, reacting personally, whatever felt most honest and personal in my understanding of each essay as representative of my developing understanding of The Essay.

As I made my way backward through volumes, I started also asking bigger questions about the volumes themselves as anthologies. More and more, I found myself thinking of any volume of BAE not as the best American essays of a given year, but as a glimpse into one essayist’s, the guest editor’s, conception of what an essay is. 

The 2004 volume of The Best American Essays is one of my favorites, but it probably wouldn’t have been my first choice to review for this advent. It would have been interesting to note the irony that my two least favorite volumes—2007 and 2010—were edited by two of my favorite nonfiction writers, David Foster Wallace and Christopher Hitchens, and that both volumes were published the year before their respective too-early deaths. Or the personal, memoir-driven 2011 and 2013 volumes edited by Edwidge Danticat and Cheryl Strayed. Or Mary Oliver’s 2009 volume, maybe my favorite of them all, the essays of which seem to have been selected mostly for other writers to read.

Alas, my choices were limited to what was left after the heavy hitters had left the table: 1993, 1994, 2004, and 2006. Ok, confession: I’m still on 1998 in my backward timeline continuum, which leaves me unqualified to judge 1993 and 1994. And I could have just as happily done 2006; Lauren Slater’s editorial vision is distinctive, favoring grief narratives and intensively personal essays, and her introduction uses her own personal-but-research-driven psychological work Opening Skinner’s Box and its ensuing negative reception by many clinical psychologists as a case study in the malleability of truth. 

Then I reread Louis Menand’s introduction to the 2004 edition, and I became more cognizant of something I’d always suspected: This volume, more than any other, had so many essays that instructed me on what an essay is, or can be. With this in mind, here are my Top 5 Things I learned About Essaying from BAE2004, in the order I rediscover them. 

1. Writing essays is more like singing than speaking. 

It’s probably fitting to start with Menand’s introduction, which like many of the BAE introductions is an essay itself, and is here subtitled “Voices.” I still today use a simple but rich analogy in which Menand compares writing to speaking: “As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. It’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony.” Also: “What writers hear, when they are trying to write, is something more like singing than speaking…What you are trying to do when you write is transpose the yakking into verbal music; and the voice inside, when you find it, which can take hours or days or weeks, is not your speaking voice. It is your singing voice—except that it comes out as writing.” I could actually do a Top Ten quotes from Louis Menand’s BAE2004 introduction, but I have a deadline to keep here. Let it just suffice to say that I found a lot to love.

2. Essay writers always seem to be running late. 

Also in his introduction, Menand says, “Writers are people for whom l’esprit de l’escalier is a recurrent experience: they are always thinking of the perfect riposte when the moment for saying it has already passed.” The first essay in the collection, published a half-century after James Agee’s death in Oxford American, is Agee’s riposte both to a now-unknown popular magazine’s coverage of the 1943 Detroit Race Riots, but more personally and more importantly to a group of drunk racist southern sailors and soldiers he overheard on an 86th Street bus who were on their way to fight against Hitler’s army. The real riposte, though, comes from an elderly black woman sharing the bus: “Ain’t your skin that make the difference, it’s how you feel inside. Ought to be ashamed. Just might bout’s well be Hitluh, as a white man from the South. Wearing a sailor’s uniform. Fighting for your country. Ought to be ashamed.” Agee then relates his own shame at not doing any of the things he thought about doing (he was, after all, drunk himself at the time). In the last sentence of the essay, not published until more than 75 years later, he says simply, “So now I am telling it to you.”

3. There seems to be a rich, diverse subgenre of Essays Of and About the Infirm, and this volume has some representative selections. 

Maybe not to the extent of the 2006 volume, which sometimes seems to be composed entirely of this subgenre, but some gems nonetheless. There is of course the annual Oliver Sacks BAE selection (which, sadly, will end this year—RIP, Dr. Sacks), a hybrid essay comprising a collection of reviews of memoirs by the blind, some quantitative research and anecdotal evidence from friends and patients of his, and some personal essaying of his own experiments in college with amphetamines and the heightened sense they gave his own “mind’s eye.” A triad of other essays—Laura Hillenbrand’s “A Sudden Illness,” Mark Slouka’s “Arrow and Wound,” and Gerald Stern’s “Bullet in My Neck”—chronicle their respective authors’ experiences with chronic fatigue syndrome, a witnessed suicide, and, well, a bullet in the neck. All three essayists find their own ways of divulging their material. Hillenbrand, most famous for writing Seabiscuit, rarely meditates on any given moment or clothes her subject in metaphor or symbolism, except for a deer caught in the headlights of a car she was in right before her symptoms started, which she sometimes imagines killed her and sent her to this hell. Both Slouka and Stern relate near-death experiences by drawing historical, personal, and literary parallels, Stern bringing in Bruno Schulz’s brutal, cowardly murder by a German officer after painting said officer’s children’s nursery, Yeats’s poetry, and Mann’s Dr. Faustus, while Slouka links Dostoyevsky’s mock-execution in 1849 and Prague poet laureate Jaroslav Seifert’s near-execution by Germans in 1945 to his own experience.

4. Essayists find meaning in lists. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I’d already gotten to Wayne Koestenbaum’s “My ‘80s” before reading it in this volume. In fact, of all the BAE pieces I’ve read so far, I already knew this one (and possibly David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” from BAE 2005) the best. I consider it part of a sub- (perhaps counter-) genre that I call the list-essay, which would also include Leonard Michaels’ “In the Fifties" (coincidentally, the next essay in this anthology is Michaels’ “My Yiddish,” one of his last written pieces before his death in 2005), Kitty Burns Florey’s “”Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog” (BAE 2005), Michele Morano’s “Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood” (BAE 2006), Sue Allison’s “Taking a Reading” (BAE 2009), Hilton Als’ “Buddy Ebsen” (BAE 2011), Angela Morales’s “The Girls in My Town” (BAE 2013), and Mary Gordon’s “On Enmity” (BAE 2014). The most foundational “rule” of the form, as I see it, is that image, aphorism, and anecdote, when separated and listed, assume a new artistic depth that they wouldn’t have in the analog context of a linear narrative or argument. Also, in isolating and listing all these things, I believe a richer meaning rises out of the simple accumulation of facts and impressions—in reducing oneself to a simple list, the writer transcends his or her own self-conceptions and becomes a rich framework of accumulated details. In “My ‘80s,” for example, Koestenbaum uses the word “AIDS” six different times, in completely different contexts; only once does he mention that AIDS is one “of the salient features of our ‘80s,” and even then he doesn’t really need to, as he’s already implied it through the accumulated mention. Or perhaps more cleverly, in the last paragraph he mentions the word “boat” in relation to himself seven times, then says, “How many times must I repeat the word ‘boat’ to convince you that in the ‘80s I was a small boat with a minor mission and a fear of sinking? The boat did not sink.”

5. Polemics can be fun! 

Christopher Hitchens, in his introduction to BAE 2010, decried the dearth of good polemic essays in that year’s work; I tend to decry the dearth of good polemic essays in the world at large. They seem to be everywhere—mainstream news, blogs, student work—and they tend to bore the shit out of me. One side of anything just never seems to be enough. But every now and then a Best American Essay of the polemic persuasion (so to speak) does more than take a side, or takes more than one side, or something like that. Take, for example, Rick Moody’s “Against Cool.” Like Mark Greif’s “Against Exercise” from BAE 2005, Moody uses the polemic form implicit in the title as a false signifier—what they’re both taking to task isn’t a specific segment of American culture that may disagree with them, but American culture itself. Neither seems like an argument, but rather like a well-researched plea for circumspection. A trope I see running through the entirety of Moody’s essay is that cool is innately rebellious, but not just rebellious—the cool are above authority. That, I think, is the inevitable downfall of cool in American popular culture, and the crux of Moody's plot arc of cool—this conception of life is innately false. But the last two pages are when Moody gets to his more hopeful argument (perhaps) that all these things can be left behind and we can start over, if we just abandon this endlessly overused word cool and start anew. He suggests some alternatives, then concludes, “But this job is best left to you, users of the American tongue. Seize control of your splendid language. Work your alchemical mumbo-jumbo. Mix up your slang. Blow your innumerable horns. Play well. Play with feeling.”

I’m stopping myself now, though I haven’t even gotten to the intrigue of having essays by power couple Kathryn Chetkovich and Jonathan Franzen—the former of whom even writes about the latter—or the way Luc Sante extends the ruminations of Fitzgerald’s “My Lost City” on NYC’s (and their own) continual cycles of rise and fall and rise again and fall again. 

Thinking of these cycles, I find myself applying this paradigm to the essay, which like a city is a composite of millions of voices, personalities, perspectives, imaginations, and intellects. Every volume of The Best American Essays is like an annual report on the state of the city, or a report from a fellow traveler, much like Calvino’s fictionalized Marco Polo in Invisible Cities, whose words here can be applied to the city or the essay:

For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glimpse of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop.

John Proctor lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, two daughters, and Chihuahua. He’s written memoir, fiction, poetry, criticism, and just about everything in the space between them, which he tends now to collect under the generic term “essay.” His work has been published in Atlas and Alice, The Weeklings, The Normal School, The Austin Review, DIAGRAM, Superstition Review, Underwater New York, Defunct, New Madrid, Numero Cinq, and McSweeney’s. His essay “The Question of Influence” was a recent Notable selection in The Best American Essays 2015, and his essay “The A-Rod of Ballhawking” was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart. He serves as Online Editor for Hunger Mountain Journal of the Arts, and teaches writing, media studies, and communication theory at Manhattanville College. You can find him online at NotThatJohnProctor.com/.

BAE 1990 as read by Joni Tevis: The Traveler: An Essay and Playlist

The Traveler: An Essay and Playlist

Joni Tevis

*

The legend of the Traveler appears in every civilization, perpetually assuming new forms, afflictions, powers, and symbols. Through every age he walks in utter solitude toward penance and redemption.

*

Should I mark more than shining hours?

—Evan S. Connell, Jr., Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel [1]

Annie Dillard’s “The Stunt Pilot” [2] is an essay about a plane crash. I’ve been thinking about that as I hustle through airport after airport, on book tour. TUFFY, says the stenciled vinyl of the courtesy wheelchair. TUG, says the grill of the luggage hauler, in a beefy font that I find comforting as I sit in the plane, waiting for it to take off and pondering my own mortality. You know. Like you do. For a certain kind of reader—well, for me—to reread “The Stunt Pilot” is to slingshot oneself back into Dillard’s deep catalogue; it’s of a piece, as far as I can tell, with three of her books of nonfiction. So I sit in a narrow seat, lap belt low and tight across my hips, and read. Dillard might be as obsessed with planes and plane crashes as I am. From “Total Eclipse”: “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.” [3] From “Stunt Pilot”: “I gave up on everything, the way you do in airplanes; it was out of my hands.” [4]

Brain science tells us that the mind loves novelty, which explains the phenomenon of why days and nights on the road seem to partake of time in a different way than do days and nights spent at home. When you’re presented with novel sights and experiences, they seem to take longer, because your brain is making new connections. I am on the road [5] and I am thinking about Annie Dillard—her essays, specifically, but more honestly, her narrator, also a person on the road, and therefore someone who notices more and questions more than she would while safe at home.

The article about the plane crash that killed geologist and stunt pilot Dave Rahm ran in the Spokane Daily Chronicle on August 4, 1976, and its particulars would satisfy a fact-checker [6] tasked with reconciling Dillard’s version of events with what the rest of the world agrees happened: Rahm crashed during a show in Jordan. “The plane spun down and never came out of it,” Dillard writes; “it nosedived into the ground and exploded. He bought the farm.” [7] Next to the story about Rahm’s death, the Spokane paper ran an AP article headlined “Pair of Holdups Make Bad Day.” In Providence, Rhode Island, a man was walking home when another man “grabbed a bag from him and fled. The bag contained a six-pack of beer and tomatoes.” Then a second man returned the bag to him and demanded a reward. When the first man offered him two quarters, he said that wasn’t enough, pulled a gun, and robbed him of $130. “Robert A. Greenway Jr. says it just wasn’t his day.”

*

Of those who studied Talmud in eighteenth-century Ukraine, Dillard writes, “people respected books. When a book wore out, they buried it like a person.” [8] I bought my copy of The Writing Life, a paperback with a blurry painting of a sailboat on the cover, as an undergraduate in Tallahassee. I paid $5.95, real money for me at the time.

Back then, I read issues of The Southern Review and The Georgia Review and Ploughshares at the long tables in Florida State’s library, even as I read everything else, compulsively, from Our Bodies, Ourselves to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to the filthy, descriptive, fascinating graffiti carved by frat brothers on the desks on the 7th floor. I read in the stacks as the sun faded behind the loblolly pines that ringed Landis Green and the sodium lights winked on, and then I walked back alone to my dorm room. I drove to the bookstore alone, I bought my cans of soup and Healthy Choice dinners alone, I drove to Carrabelle alone and walked on the beach, where interesting things washed up onshore. I examined the skeletons of dead fish, and once found a woman’s black high-heeled shoe with barnacles encrusting its peeling leather. Sometimes I sang Will Oldham songs [9] as loud as I could and it didn’t matter, because the dirty waves were louder than I was and anyway the beach was empty.

On the weekends, other students drank too much at the cheap bars on Tennessee Street and sometimes fell into the four lanes of traffic that separated the bars from campus and were grievously hurt. Me, I drank Orange Crush [10] I bought at the gas station on Highway 319 and headed out of town to the Huddle House, where a person could sit at a booth and write in a notebook for hours and not be bothered. I didn’t have much to say so I tried to describe things: the granite bald back home in South Carolina where you could sit and watch the sun set behind the Blue Wall; the way semi-trucks barreled south from Macon on I-75, bleeding their air brakes; the very diner I sat in, eavesdropping. What’re you writing? someone asked one night. You writing about us? Of course I lied. But I was desperate. I wanted to write something that would matter, that people would read. I would have sold out anyone to get the stuff I needed to make this work, even my family, my friends, let alone these strangers whose names I would never know, because I never asked.

My copy of The Writing Life has accumulated little scraps of things over the years, drawing ephemera, like a Bible. Here’s a bookmark from The Paperback Rack in Tallahassee that reads WE GIVE CASH FOR LITERATURE. A postcard from the Houston reading series in which Dillard read, February 20, 2001; the next day, I drove her to the airport in my Crown Victoria. [11] The postcard is addressed to me, at my old Houston address on West Main Street, but my name is wrong. [12] A square of paper with “REVISION” scribbled in my handwriting. A postcard picturing Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, standing on the shores of Lake Bemidji in northern Minnesota since the 1930s. Folks who live in Bemidji like to tell you that Paul and Babe are the second-most-photographed statues in America [13], and that might be true. In lucky summers, I teach workshops in Bemidji, and I must have taken this in to read to the class. Whenever I have a group of people gathered in a room who are made to listen politely to what I have to say, I exhort them to do as Dillard does, and “aim for the chopping block.” [14] Aim for the chopping block, she says, and not the wood you’re trying to split; don’t let the words get in the way of the idea that you’re trying to share with your reader. I love this passage so much and have read it so many times in so many places that I’ve come to think of it as a kind of editor’s prayer, a litany whose repetition will help bring forth clear thought.

So how do we learn to write; how do I try to teach it? Kind of like this book: a collection of anecdotes and advice, enthusiasm and examples (“They thought I was raving again. It’s just as well.” [15]) The best thing is to read something that’s already good and take it apart, then reverse-engineer it to see how it fits together, but as a philosophy of pedagogy, all of this can feel a little ad hoc. I ask Gil Allen, dear colleague and longtime teacher of writing, how he teaches [16]. “Establish trust,” he says, or you won’t be able to do anything else. Give advice according to each student’s ability. Tell them to read published work, and to read their own drafts aloud.

And so I go back to the text. [17] Rereading the stunt pilot essay, I appreciate the writing as much as ever. I’ve read these comparisons aloud to my students for years: doing a barrel roll with Rahm, Dillard writes, “We stuck to the plane’s sides like flung paint….Vaguely I could see the chrome sea twirling over Rahm’s head like a baton, and the dark islands sliding down the skies like rain.” [18] Lovely illustration of the advice to “compare the unknown to the known.” Earlier in the essay, she stretches out the description of Rahm’s stunt pilot routine for a good three pages, longer than you think the material will bear, but it still works; I credit her strong verbs, lists, and comparisons. “Rahm’s line unrolled in time,” she writes. “Like music, it split the bulging rim of the future along its seam. It pried out the present….The human pilot, Dave Rahm, worked in the cockpit right at the plane’s nose; his very body tore into the future for us and reeled it down upon us like a curling peel.” [19]

*

Airports, airplanes, and hotel rooms bless the traveler with two gifts: a place to sit, and time to think. So I take notes. AND ANYWHERE I WOULD HAVE FOLLOWED YOU say the subtitles beneath the figure skater on television. Sunday night, far from home, chicken fried rice from the airport food court. The skater spins with one leg tucked under his body and the other pointed straight, then pulls himself upright, spinning faster and faster. CHEERS AND APPLAUSE read the subtitles to the big finish.

Yes, we notice more on the road, and Dillard seems always to have lived there. I’m rereading For the Time Being now, published about a decade after the stunt pilot essay, but ten years ain’t much in the ebb and flow of time—as her essays keep reminding me—and she’s working over the same questions. I map the book’s structure on the back of a receipt from a candy shop (Terminal B, Gate 41), testifying to my purchase of a lollipop to take home to my child. What is holy? Dillard asks. “Didja miss me?” the man in dark-wash Dickies asks his wife, who has guarded their luggage while he sallied forth in search of fried chicken. “HAVE A SWEET LIFE!” advises the sales receipt from the candy shop. “In fact,” Dillard writes, “the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. There is no less holiness at this time—as you are reading this—than there was the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Chebar, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of God. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree.” [20]

The trees are silk, meant to resemble ficus, and they are at least fifteen feet tall. There are two of them, next to windows that let in actual sunlight. A television set suspended from the high ceiling gives information about the bombings in Paris this weekend, and the French government’s response. A boy, 13 or 14, stands at a gate, tears streaming down his face. He has missed his flight. A lanyard around his neck declares him an UNACCOMPANIED MINOR. A woman wears a faded t-shirt with Munch’s “The Scream” on it, and man wears one that reads I’M HERE FOR THE PARTY. Dillard finds a prayer written in French blown loose from the West Wall in Jerusalem and includes it here untranslated. [21] Did she tuck it back into the stones of the wall or into her pocket? Does it matter? It’s not hers, I want to object, but neither are the boy’s tears at Gate A15. Does it matter that when I repeat, quietly, the words written there, that I can guess at what they mean but am not 100% sure?
I hate airports but I love the bottle fillers I sometimes find there. Water pours in a sturdy stream into my red bottle, and a digital counter ticks upward: 10,474; 10,475 plastic bottles kept out of the waste stream by this filter so far. A green light tells me the filter is fresh. Pebbles encased in clear resin make up the backsplash, so subliminally I take in the message that I am filling my waterskin by a clear stream of running water. Streams and water make most of the world’s supply of sand, Dillard tells me in For the Time Being, sand that ends up in the world’s low places, like deserts and beaches. Streams are sand factories, and outside the tall glass windows there are what used to be car factories, this being Detroit, a city I have seen many times but only ever through windows. Some of the car factories have been bulldozed. [22]

Dillard has a thing for low places, and for waves, both in sand dunes and in water, and all three of these books [23] she spends a fair bit of time staring out her window at the waves, or walking along the beach, and pondering the mysteries of life. She writes of a rabbi who warned his students against visiting lonely places but she didn’t take his advice too much to heart, and when I was in college, I used to do the same old thing. I never was able to make much sense of anything during those lonely beach walks—I didn’t know what questions I was even asking, except maybe “why am I alone?” Figuring out that the work of writing an essay was there for me went a long way toward solving that problem, though marrying a kind man helped more.

Classically, the essay can be a way to knock around a problem until it’s at least, if not solved, a rounder shape, which Dillard tells us is a way to know if a grain of sand is old or young. And the problems she raises are basically insoluble. Why does evil exist? is one. But How then shall we live? is another, and more practical. (I find myself under her spell again, taking on her cadences.) She does seem to want to give us, or at least herself, some clue about how best to “mark these shining hours.” Nearing the conclusion of For the Time Being, she seems to agree with Martin Buber by including and transliterating his ideas: “Here and now, presumably, an ordinary person would approach with a holy and compassionate intention the bank and post office, the car pool, the God-help-us television, the retirement account, the car, desk, phone, and keys.” [24] “Just like me, they long to be/Close to you,” Karen Carpenter sang on the loudspeakers as I passed the skycap’s station before dawn.

I sit here in the library’s top floor as the afternoon climbs and the sun blinds me off the clear glass window. Yesterday the plane circled low over this building and I saw the rest of the campus—stadium, academic buildings, dorms—with that miniaturized, slightly unreal cast that seeing a place from above can give. This room contains, yes, two more silk ficus trees; tall windows with electric shades; windows looking out over flat roofs, parking lots, an anemometer that must be part of a weather data station, four bells hung vertically in a carillon. Machines to make music, to record the clouds and what gave rise to them. Yesterday in the Detroit airport, a sparrow flew from a television monitor down to the carpeted floor, plucked a tidbit of food, and carried it back to her nest behind the perforated ceiling tiles. Pan-entheism, Dillard says, holds that “the one transcendent God made the universe, and his presence kindles inside every speck of it. Each clot of clay conceals a coal. A bird flies the house.” [25] That sparrow flew the concourse and here, now, I hear the rhythmic breathing of a student, asleep in an upholstered chair in the sun. I WILL SING NO MATTER WHAT read the sign at the Seventh Day Adventist Church my host drove me past yesterday.

*

Last night there was just a rind of a moon, and the air coming in through the window over the lake was cold. I stayed in a historic mansion, now a rooming house, and when I walked downstairs to seek hot water for tea I found all the lights on in every room I passed—third floor, second floor, ground floor—but not another soul. All the doors to the rooms stood open, and each bed was neatly made. Quiet pillows. Framed prints from old natural-history books hung on the walls. DECIDUOUS WOODLANDS, my favorite, pictured pendunculate oak, Lords-and-Ladies, Enchanter’s Nightshade.The carpeted stairs creaked underfoot. KEEP SMILING the memo pad on the check-in desk downstairs commanded. The pad was printed with a picture of Mickey Mouse striding along an empty path with his hands in his pockets. LET US HELP YOU CREATE A SPECIAL MEMORY read the brochure that listed prices for summer weddings, weekends when all seventeen bedrooms are booked. The computer monitor in the silent vestibule displayed my check-in and contact information. ONE GUEST, it read. “According to the Talmud, when a person is afraid to walk at night, a burning torch is worth two companions, and a full moon is worth three.” [26] I had no good reason to get spooked but I walked back upstairs to my room and locked the door. At 8:27 the phone next to the bed rang. It was the night watchman.

*

Morning comes. “We have less time than we knew,” Dillard writes, “and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild.” [27] I might not care about theology today, and only love strong sentences that feel good in my mouth when I speak them aloud. I’m in Holy the Firm now, a book I used to love, but which now troubles me. “There are no holy grapes,” she writes, “there is no holy ground, nor is there anyone but us.” [28] She can’t help it; she loves to juxtapose the physical world with the spiritual one, transubstantiating the wine as she carries it home. And I love this moment of transcendence she describes, walking home with the wine she’s bought for communion. It feels earned, hers. I have had moments like that, too, when I felt especially aware and lucky and glad and grateful for work to do and the tools with which to do it. Outside the rooming house’s big bay window, the newly-cut grass is green, but only a few brown leaves still hang on the red oak, and the metal patio furniture will be stacked in the junkhouse soon, to wait for May. A hired man and his son have just finished setting up an artificial tree here in a corner of the breakfast room and turned on its LED lights, which glow ice blue.

“A name,” Dillard writes, “like a face, is something you have when you’re not alone.” [29] She’s radically alone in this book, even when crushing apples into cider with friends, even when buying wine. On the road a person has a face (replicated on one’s photo identification) and a name (replicated on ID and boarding pass) but is nevertheless alone. Where you headed? is a question I do not care to answer. “A life without sacrifice is abomination,” [30] she writes, and I agree with her. But she loses me with poor Julie Norwich, a girl burned by a freak airplane accident, and whose story Dillard tries to fit into the question of why suffering exists in the world. I don’t understand.

Fact-checkers will see the tie Dillard’s making between the girl she calls “Julie Norwich” and “Julian of Norwich.” Fact-checkers will find, on www.PlaneCrashMap.com [31], a listing of crashes in the Pacific Northwest going from January 1964 until March 2013, details of a plane crash in Dillard’s area of Puget Sound that took place on November 19, 1975, the date on which she says the events she describes happened. But fact-checkers who dig further (tenacious!) will discover that no little girl is mentioned in that crash of a Beech 19A in Port Orchard, Washington. Did that child really exist; did she suffer the burns that Dillard describes? I pray she did not. But if she did, it seems monstrous to me that Dillard should use her as a mere figure, a prop with which to work through an idea: “Happy birthday, little one and wise: you got there early, the easy way.” “That skinlessness, that black shroud of flesh in strips on your skull, is your veil.” “Forget whistling; you have no lips for that, or for kissing the face of a man or a child.” [32] No! I write in the margins of the page. The book’s last lines—“So live. I’ll be the nun for you. I am now” [33]—used to delight me, but now my heart turns from them. Is it because I’m older now, with a child of my own? Do I turn away from this maker I so revered, even as she turns away from God? “My father, my father, the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof!” [34] The vision of Elijah, who was sustained in the wilderness by ravens who brought him bread and meat.

*

I think Dillard knew she hadn’t reached a conclusion on these questions either, even after the ending of Holy the Firm, even after describing her process in The Writing Life [35], so she wrote For the Time Being. “’I can and I must throw myself into the thick of human endeavor, and with no stopping for breath,’ said Teilhard, who by no means stopped for breath. But what distinguishes living “completely in the world” (Bonhoeffer) or throwing oneself ‘into the thick of human endeavor (Teilhard), as these two prayerful men did, from any other life lived in the thick of things? A secular broker’s life, a shoe salesman’s life, a mechanic’s, a writer’s, a farmer’s? Where else is there? The world and human endeavor catch and hold everyone alive but a handful of hoboes, nuns, and monks.” [36]

So her thinking has shifted from the earlier nun’s life she valued for the burned girl and, more, for herself, at the end of Holy the Firm. Now it seems better or truer to her to value all human endeavor as potentially holy and good. She seems to be saying that we all need to approach life, no matter our spiritual tribe, with a moment-by-moment awareness of its beauty, fragility, meaning. Life has meaning. Of course we forget this but we must also remember it. Of course we sift through its details in order to fit it to the page, but I think she’s saying that what makes it to the page isn’t more enlightened that what doesn’t.

STUFF IT, read the sign on the mini-storage warehouse as the cab driver drove me to another airport. TIME HOME WITH FAMILY said the side of the semi-truck who passed us in the rain. He was registered to Mechanicsburg PA, a good day’s drive from there. “I want to go home,” the woman in the seat behind me on the Chicago-Hartford flight said to her friend. “Cora! What does the sheep say? What does the sheep say? BAAAAAAH.” Woman, Skype, faraway baby.

I remove my shoes and coat, place them in an empty bin, and walk slowly through the metal detector’s open door with empty pockets, stocking feet. “Then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will,” Dillard writes; “then it’s time to break our necks for home.” [37] By the time my first flight lands, my connecting flight’s already boarding, two concourses away. I swap out my heels for my running shoes, tie the laces tight, and sprint down the tunnel as fast as ever I can, weaving between clots of slowpokes and dodging around trash cans and sliding into the departure gate at the last possible moment. I will get home to you. I will get home to you. If I have to run from one time zone to another, I will get home to you, will kiss your dear face before the sun sets and darkness comes.

*

Endnotes

[1] Used as epigraph in Annie Dillard’s book of nonfiction, For the Time Being (1999)
[2] Best American Essays 1990; seventh and final chapter, The Writing Life, 1989
[3] “Total Eclipse,” from Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982
[4] The Writing Life, 99. Cue up Buddy Holly, “That’ll Be the Day.” Buddy, I think of you as I sit on the dark runway, how you were just making a living. From across the vale, do you feel my regard? 
[5] Cue up Joni Mitchell, “All I Want”: “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling/ traveling, traveling, traveling./ Looking for something. What can it be?” 
[6] Thank you, fact-checkers! My debt to you shall never be fully repaid.
[7] The Writing Life, 106
[8] For The Time Being, 55
[9] “Little blue eyes, why did I follow you? Why did I snap at you? I liked you so.” Also, “Ohio River Boat Song.” 
[10] Listen, now, to REM, “Orange Crush”; The Allman Brothers Band, “Midnight Rider”
[11] An ice-blue 1995 model with a V-8 engine, very sweet ride. Cue up Gillian Welch, “Pass You By"
[12] "Jeanie Tevis"
[13] Behind Mt. Rushmore
[14] The Writing Life, 59
[15] Holy the Firm, 18
[16] Read Catma, his latest book of poetry, recently published by Measure Press.
[17] From www.AnnieDillard.com: “The teacher in me says, "The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts."
[18] The Writing Life, 104
[19] The Writing Life, 96
[20] For the Time Being, 88
[21] For the Time Being, 189

[22] For example, the Packard plant, in October 2014

[23] The Writing Life, For the Time Being, and Holy the Firm

[24] For the Time Being, 202

[25] For the Time Being, 137

[26] For the Time Being, 178

[27] Holy the Firm, 21

[28] Holy the Firm, 62

[29] Holy the Firm, 71

[30] Holy the Firm, 72
[31] Page 11 of 16; 50 crashes per page
[32] All from Holy the Firm, 74
[33] Holy the Firm, 76
[34] Holy the Firm, 76
[35] A book she calls “embarrassing” on her website
[36] For the Time Being, 171-172
[37] Holy the Firm, 62

*

Bibliography

Atwan, Robert and Justin Kaplan. The Best American Essays 1990. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage, 2000.
--. Holy the Firm. New York: Harper Colophon, 1984.
--. Teaching a Stone to Talk. New York: HarperPerennial, 1982.
--. The Writing Life. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.
Salih, Sarah and Denise N. Baker, editors. Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. (“Julie Norwich and Julian of Norwich: Annie Dillard’s Theodicy in Holy the Firm,” by Denise N. Baker, was particularly useful.)

*

And also:

Deep thanks to Milkweed Editions, and to my recent hosts at universities, bookstores, and conferences. I have wanted to live a life like this for a good twenty years, and your generosity has made it possible. Thank you.

*

Formerly a park ranger, factory worker, and seller of cemetery plots, Joni Tevis is the author of two books of essays, The Wet Collection: A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory, and The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse, both published by Milkweed Editions.  Her essays have appeared in Orion, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. She serves as the Bennette E. Geer Professor of Literature at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.

BAE 2001 read by Matthew Gavin Frank

After reading Rebecca McClanahan’s “Book Marks,” in The Best American Essays 2001—which, in part, engages the ways in which a reader’s written marginalia (not to mention sloughed-off bodily detritus wedged into the book’s crotch) can serve to converse with the primary text—I was inspired to write a great failure of an essay comprised solely of imagined marginalia (and detritus) lurking among the pages of Borges’ Labyrinths. For some reason, in this essay, I decided that a chain of spitballs should run down the book’s inner hinge, forming a speed bump between “Avatars of the Tortoise” and “The Mirror of Enigmas.” Should the daring reader unscroll said spitballs, he or she would find carefully chosen excerpts, rendered calligraphically, of the six-page Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division Report #2946, dated May 20, 1983, on Rabid Bats in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (abridged version), including “Contemporary rabies tests for the silver-haired bat of Escanaba involve such classic methods as impression smears of brain material,” and “We used 3-pound coffee cans containing chloroform-saturated cotton balls.”

Soon afterward, I was seduced by Alberto Rios’ poem/lyric essay, “Some Extensions on the Sovereignty of Science,” in which he writes, as a sort of ars poetica/essaica,

When something explodes, for example,

Nobody is confused about what to do—you look toward it.
Loud is a magnet. But the laws of magnetism are more complex. 

One might just as well try this: When something explodes,
Turn exactly opposite from it and see what there is to see. 

The loud will take care of itself, and everyone will be able to say
What happened in that direction. But who is looking 

The other way? Nature, that magician and author of loud sounds,
Zookeeper and cook, electrician and provocateur— 

Maybe these events are Nature’s sleight of hand, and the real
Thing that’s happening is in the other hand, 

Or behind or above or below or inside us. 

Is Rios effectively admitting that, in trying to write a piece about the death of his father and his attendant grief, he had to “turn away from the explosion,” that very scrap of subject matter about which he wanted to write, in order to record what was going on in the opposite direction—the stuff lurking in the margins? Did he feel compelled to draw a chalk outline around his main subject, to grapple to uncover the right blend of chalk necessary to evoke the body? (He uncovered, incidentally, terminal moraines, the smallest muscle in the human body lurking in the ear, and the Duesenberg).

When recently reengaging The Best American Essays 2001, I tried, as a reader, to turn away from the explosion, the text, to stare into the margins, and then beyond the margins. To, eventually, turn the page, where I found, of course, more text, each subsequent essay girdled by the one preceding it, each serving as the marginalia to the other. What follows is an essay of record, a collection of lines evoking sentences of primary text costumed in marginalia’s clothes. The essay is comprised of one line from each of the essays included in BAE 2001, in order. The first sentence is from the first essay, the second from the second, and so on. The last line is from Kathleen Norris’ introduction, and the brackets are mine. I hope it serves as a celebration. I’m not quite sure into what this accumulates, but here are words, absurd conversation, chalk-on-chalk…


On the Cadavre Exquis Rotting in the Margins

At two, most of my excess body hair had fallen off like scales, except for a triangular swatch above my fanny, and a single silky stripe from my ribs to my pudendum. Prayer is personal. Fuck the criminal codes. Fanny recalled how they set out from Tahiti, where they had been living in contented isolation, and set their sails for Hawaii. We get what we need. Mind you, until recently my own family has never been much good at mourning. My father, who spent his first twenty years after college at the butcher block in his father’s grocery store, and then in his own, was a valuable resource. These were big men, compared with the agile, wiry horse hands who ran beside their charges during the performance and rode them back and forth like a rodeo string between the railroad yards and the circus lot, morning and night. The new religion outdraws the old. Nobody is there to notice whether you stand straight or slouch, or how you suck your stomach in. This is my afternoon for hearing voices, it seems. “Men will be men.” Midnights for Edgar Allen Poe seemed less a time than a territory, a place of woefully distant vistas, as if he were stargazing from the bottom of a well. And I bought into it, failing to see until now that it concealed a deeper resistance that he had no words for. “Come into the light of things,” he teased, “Let nature be your teacher.” After this momentous transgression, I quickly reverted to a Morasha girl-camper persona. My God, I say aloud, it’s the sand. The euphony of the name belies its malevolence. Of course, there are storms, too, when the whole house rocks and the waves upbeat on the underside of the deck boards, and sometimes wind, and the wind sizzles, and you had better be on the ocean’s side then, or you would be afraid. So my life has gone through youth and middle age. It had a creamy stripe down the back from which four tufts of brownish hairs stood up like a liner’s funnels, and longer sheaves of hairs stuck out in front of it and to the rear. Art bled and bled. The past teaches us that images of terror—used responsibly—can foster a climate in which terror is no longer tolerated. I count myself among the latter group. The objective was to form a human pyramid with our bodies, and to succeed, each player wanted to be able to escape the bottom and remain on top. Then the great lens swiveled severely up and about, the beach now offering itself to my gaze, more lovely in similitude than it actually was: brown and silver, long and lonely, bordered by an unstable line of foam from the streaks of the blue-gray sea which in their pale and silent motions, were streaks of life, streaks of time. [See?]…celibate people can make good friends.

*

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and 2 chapbooks. He teaches at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he tempered his gin with two droplets (per 750ml) of tincture of odiferous whitefish liver. For health.

BAE 1996: Tests of Time by Eric LeMay

I am in the Reading Room of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, with its dark vaulted ceiling, elegantly carved buttresses, huge faux-candle chandeliers, faded tapestries, pictorial stained glass, and old portraits of shadowy figures gazing vacantly on the long wooden table where I sit. The dim glow from one of those small lamps spills a solitary pool of light in front of me. The room has the same romantic design that created the dinning hall at Hogwarts. It's no room in which to write like Shakespeare, but you could certainly compile your two-volume study on Shakespeare’s Anglo-Franco lexicographic variations in this fancy leather chair. I shouldn’t have worn sneakers.

Despite my distinctly non-scholastic clothes, the librarian has handed over a rare book from the vault: Essays written by Sir William Cornwallis the younger, Knight. Cornwallis was the first self-professed follower of Montaigne in England and, in many ways, he marks the start of the English essay. (Francis Bacon, to be sure, published the first book of Essayes in 1597, but his are decidedly impersonal essays, written against Montaigne's precedent. Cornwallis, in contrast, wants very much to sound like Montaigne, which is to say like himself.) Cornwallis's book was printed in London, "at the signe of the Hand and Plowgh in Fleet-street." The first part came out in 1600, the second in 1601. I'm reading "Of Essayes, & Bookes." I've read it a few times and think of it often. Its opening always trips me up:

I Holde neither Plutarches nor none of the auncient short manner of writings nor Montaigne’s nor such of this latter time to be rightly termed Essayes; for though they be short, yet they are strong and able to endure the sharpest tryall.   

A true essay, for Cornwallis, isn't strong. It isn't able to endure the trials that a reader might inflict on it, the questions a reader might ask of it. How should I live? What should I do? In Plutarch's and Montaigne's work, you'll find insight, moral instruction, even wisdom, but these are the very qualities that, according to Cornwallis, make their work something other than essays. Cornwallis sees the essay as something more like a moral process. Through writing and reading them, you can become better, but this is an undertaking that doesn't end on the page or in your life. It's a constant striving, an essaying.

I don't much agree with Cornwallis about what an essay is—I find essays that want to make me better tough to read—but I love his assertion about what an essay isn't. It isn't meant to last. It doesn't need to meet the expectations that, say, a poem faces, with its leap toward immortality, its demand to endure the test of time. An essay can be all right for right now. Good enough to pass the time, but time will, as time does, move on. To put it another way, imagine if you said to a poet, "Your sonnet is good enough for the moment." You wouldn't have a happy poet. As an essayist, however, I'm fine with inconsequence. "Hey,” says my friend Ghosh, “I read your essay." That, to me, is high praise. Out of all the things you could be reading, my essay held your attention for the time it took you to read it. Occasionally, when I'm feeling cheeky, I'll ask, "Did you finish it?" It's surprising how many people don't finish (my) essays. "I'm about halfway," says Ghosh. And weeks later: "Still about halfway."

These are some of the thoughts I bring to the Best American Essay series each year when it comes out. Is it a boon for an essayist to be included among the "best" of 1987 or 1996 or 2013? Or is that basically putting an expiration date on your essay? When I miss reading the collection for a given year, which I usually discover because the next year's collection comes out, I find myself feeling resentful about the previous year: I don't want to go back and read the old ones. I might as well read tweets from 2009 or eat a rotten peach. What's the point, for example, of reading the best essays from 1996 unless I have to write about them, scholarly-like, as being somehow indicative of 1996. You know, ponder the zeitgeist.

Here's one reason: in the Best American Essays of 1996, the very first essay that I ever published was included among the "Notable Essays of 1995, Selected by Robert Atwan." Oh, yes, twenty years ago I was notable, and it's hard to convey the thrill my younger self felt when I was included in a long list at the back of a book that I probably never read, so smitten was I with my own name: "Eric Charles LeMay 'A Biography of the Nameless: Jane and John Doe.' The Georgia Review, Fall." I do remember that I made my parents go and buy a copy, so they too could bask in my name. I didn’t feel the need to send them a copy of the essay itself. That seemed inconsequential in light of being noticed, notable, of note. Robert Atwan, I thought this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Of course, I was in my mid-twenties, an age when hope still seems possible. I was living just outside DC, in the largest apartment complex on the East Coast. This monstrosity of civic planning was made up of two- and three-story buildings clustered around a series of children’s playgrounds and parking lots. The Springhill Lake Apartments had its own post office, its own grocery store and recreation center, its own elementary school. It also had a small, brackish, manmade lake. (Hence the name.) To walk in any direction from Springhill Lake was to meet an impasse. To the north, Interstate 95, a carbon-churning artery into Washington DC. To the east, six overcrowded lanes of Route 201. To the south, the backside of Beltway Plaza, an ancient dying mall. And to the west, a scraggly thicket of trees abutting a dirty creek abutting the Greenbelt Metro line. It was a place that led to nowhere, and I lived there, in one of the 3,000 apartments that housed the Springhill Lake’s residents.

Like them, I occasionally got lost. I would come back at night, my headlights catching fragments of the same beige building, reproduced endlessly. Was this my parking lot? My place? Where’s that dead tree? And like them, I felt no sense of ownership or obligation toward my apartment. A light fixture would break or a small-caliber bullet would nick the patio door, and I wouldn’t see any reason to alert maintenance. What was the point? It was disposable architecture, for disposable people, like me. Today, two decades later, when I drive down the highway, past any of those apartments that builders stack behind exit ramps and wedge next to the Park-and-Rides, I still can’t shake the thought: I’d lived here, I’d been home by now.

Living in such a shit hole, it's not hard to see retrospectively why I'd feel so dazzled to catch Robert Atwan's gaze and show up, however nominally, in a book that appeared in a bookstore. (In 1996, there were bookstores.) Nor is it any surprise that a young, would-be writer would find "the Nameless" a beguiling subject. I, too, was nameless, but hoping to make my name. My essay, which is a cultural and personal history of Jane and John Doe, explores the significance we attach to names, a significance which becomes all the more apparent when we suddenly become anonymous. We are all, potentially, a Jane or John Doe. Just go out for a jog without your wallet and smartphone and get hit by a car.

The essay is pretty good. I say that with the critical distance that twenty years brings. Its quality belongs, mostly, to the editorial intervention of Stanley W. Lindberg, who mailed back my submission to The Georgia Review (there was also mail) slathered in red ink. His note said something like "It's a great idea, but…" I remember being taken aback at first, then taking every suggestion he made, which made the essay. It was good. It was notable. But would it stand the test of time? Was it strong and would it endure the sharpest trial?

Even before I knew I’d be writing this piece, I had the chance to ask myself those questions because I revised the essay for a new collection that came out in 2014, roughly twenty years after I first wrote it. Updating it was fairly easy. Some of the anecdotes were dated, but they still had the staying power that narrative creates. Fact dates, story survives. I decided that one way to show the essay’s continuing relevance was to replace the section breaks, once marked by asterisks, with newspaper headlines that blazoned the significance of Jane and John Done. Between sections about the history of these two figures , I inserted headlines, some of which were published well after 1995:

PSYCHIATRIC PROFILE ON JANE DOE CALLED CRUEL

- Toronto Star, September 19, 1997

LIFELIKE SCULPTURE CREATED TO ID JANE DOE

- San Francisco Chronicle, August 18, 2005

‘JANE DOE’ TESTIFIES AS TRIAL OF POLYGAMIST LEADER BEGINS

- New York Times, September 14, 2007

'JANE DOE'S' NUDE, BATTERED BODY IDENTIFIED 55 YEARS LATER

- Fox News, October 29, 2009

ARMY APOLOGIZES FOR 'DEAR JOHN DOE' LETTERS

TO KILLED SOLDIERS' SURVIVORS

- Chicago Tribune, January 8, 2009

Only now, marshaling these examples, do I see that most of these headlines have to do with violence against unidentified women. When I was collecting them, I was intent on showing the continuing, post-1995 relevancy of the Does. (The oldest headline in the essay also features Jane Doe: "PUGILISTIC "JANE DOE"[:] SHE "KNOCKS OUT" A FEMALE LAWYER AND IS ARRESTED - Morning Oregonian, July 30, 1893.") I wanted to see if my essay could endure beyond its moment. Would I be able to revise it so that readers born after 1995 found it relevant? I managed it, I think, but only because much of the original material—the historical research, for example, and the legal precedents in which the Does figured—was dated even then. There was little in the essay that marked it as being particularly characteristic of 1995.

This sense of timeliness and timelessness became a touchstone as I reread the Best American Essays 1996. I found that the essays in the collection which focused on the events of that moment, though finely, even brilliantly written, felt dated. Why read Darryl Pinckney's account of the Million Man March in Washington on October 16, 1995, except as an historical document? I’m not arguing that we live in anything like a "post-racial America." I’m stressing that time moves on. Certainly Pinckney, were he to write an essay today about that now-historical march, would frame it in light of the last twenty years of America's continuing racial—and racist—history.

Compare that event to Jane Brox’s essay on "Influenza 1918" or Gordon Grice's essay on the black widow spider. Brox reckons with the distant past and Grice with a creature whose behaviors predate the historical record. These essays could show up in the Best American Essays 2016, and no reader would know they're twenty years old.

The most substantial change I confronted in updating my essay had to do with the technology of DNA identification. When I was writing in 1995, DNA was a relatively unknown means of identifying individuals. I had to explain it, along with the protocols that the US government was planning to undertake in using it to identify soldiers who were killed in action. In the two decades that followed, CSI and other crime dramas, as well as the nightly news, would make the information about DNA identification familiar to every American. As a result, I merely had to explain the way in which the US military service is currently using the technology. I cut 352 words to 158, emphasizing that "that no member of the armed forces will ever again have to be classified as a John or Jane Doe again."

 

This information is crucial to my essay, not only because it's fascinating in its own right—we are now at a point in human history in which we will always be able to tell who we are, so long as we've archived our DNA—but also because it sets up my essay's big finish, once again in Washington, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Here it is. The savvy reader will catch the signs of my updating it:

From the marble steps rising above the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, you can see the Pentagon, stark and imposing, the scars of 9/11 no longer visible. Beyond it, the Potomac and, off in the distance, the Jefferson Memorial blend into the urban landscape of downtown Washington. Low-flying planes often pass, descending toward the nearby international airport. In late autumn only the call of a few lingering crows can be heard behind the whispers of the tourists and the clicking of the guard’s heels.

Twenty-four hours each day, 365 days each year, a single soldier in full-dress uniform marches before the tomb. Twenty-one steps across the front of the monument before turning, clicking his heels twice, placing his bayoneted rifle on his opposite shoulder, then twenty-one steps back. A changing of the guard takes place every hour, the present guard standing eye-to-eye with his replacement and saying, “Orders: remain as directed.” The replacement responds in an equally stentorian voice: “Order acknowledged.” The guards wear no insignia of ranks, so as not to outrank an unknown soldier. Tourists may watch this ceremony during all hours that Arlington National Cemetery is open to the public.

At night, two giant floodlights shine down on the guard at his post. His view must change then, becoming one of the illuminated city reflected on the river water, a continuous spread of lights stretching up to the darkness of the graveyards. On the white surface of the tomb, the reflection of the floodlights must obscure the tomb’s inscription, making the monument as unidentifiable as the soldiers it represents. What, I wonder, does a guard think while marching his twenty-one steps in the middle of that darkness surrounded by so many lights? And what, if anything, is he protecting in the anonymity of those predawn hours?

Not bad, right? And you haven't had the experience of all the intertwining facts, episodes, and meditations leading up to the this moment of closure, where, classically, the essay opens up, asking questions that become all the more resonant for having delved so deeply into the unnamed, the anonymous, Jane and John Doe, everyone and no one.

I came back to Washington not only to read Cornwallis essay in its first printing, to re-experience an essay that, somehow, has survived for over 400 years, but also because I wanted to return to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I'd pictured that moment countless times in the last twenty years. I can remember the guards, the view, the dingy light of late November. So I did. Earlier today, I walked down the mall, past the Washington Memorial, past the Lincoln Memorial, across the Arlington Memorial Bridge and over the Potomac River, its gray water furling and unfurling in the autumn wind, until I reached the Tomb, right as the clock struck the hour and the guards changed places.

Big mistake. The ceremony I'd seen so many years ago, one that, through the logic of association, I'd linked to my sense of self as a writer, had become a tourist destination. No, that's not quite right. I would have been fine if all of those tourists who'd shown up, me included, had come to witness the ceremonial changing of the guard that I'd seen. That would have seemed right and fitting. What I saw instead was that the ceremony itself had been changed to accommodate tourists. I'm not going to go into it, because it involves marching-band members and middle schoolers and a lot of pageantry, but the upshot is that a military ceremony had become a military show, one that invited kids to participate in pretend solemnity. I didn't like it.

And then, later that day, I was in the Folger Shakespeare Library, reading Cornwallis. And I realized that my experience today at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was simply another essay that need to be written, not for the ages, but for this time, our time. Here, as our history unfolds, is what we Americans make of our nameless dead. We brutalizes our Jane Does, protecting only their names from the violence we inflict upon them, while at the same time we Disneyfy those service men and women "known," as the inscription of the Tomb says, "but to God." It's an essay that's ready to be written. I'm just not the one to write it.

_

Eric LeMay's latest collection is In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and Experiments.