The Essayist's Notebook

This note follows a discussion about why I find it difficult to identify concepts such as style without a deep dive into structure; why I am so engaged with the concept of fidelity; and why I see myself as differing from many contemporary essayists who appear to write from a position in which the self stands separate from the world.

I am. I begin with am-ness. I am a being through time. My first experience is neither of philosophy nor abstraction, but of being. Soon after comes the recognition that this being exists under conditions. Hunger, shelter, affection, language, family, landscape, history, scarcity and opportunity all shape the form that being takes.

I am therefore not separate from the world. I am one of its products.

The task of inquiry is not to stand outside the world and describe it, but to dig where I stand and gradually extend perception outward. What I discover are not isolated things but relations. The world reveals itself as relation upon relation upon relation.

Perhaps this is why the essay matters to me. It allows me to explore those relations de bonne foi; beginning from the fact of my own being and moving outward into wider circles of understanding.

I am left with a notion on which to ponder: Am-ness may be the ground from which fidelity arises. One must first be before one can be de bonne foi.