An Essayist's Notebook

Every essay begins with a suspicion. A feeling that somewhere inside an anecdote, an encounter or a memory there is a larger question waiting to reveal itself.

The Espadrilles began with a contradiction.

For fifty years I have been vegetarian. For almost as long, I have lived with the small observations and challenges that accompany that choice. Some are thoughtful. Some less so. One in particular returns with remarkable perseverance.

“But you wear leather shoes.”

The observation is fair. The contradiction is real.

Originally, I imagined I was writing an essay about that contradiction and about the larger difficulty of aligning conduct with conviction. The piece would be concerned with the distance between the people we imagine ourselves to be and the people revealed by our daily actions.

But somewhere in the hills east of Tardets, and where I sit at this moment, the essay began moving in a different direction.

What began as a reflection on personal inconsistency slowly became an exploration of recognition. Of those moments when we encounter another person and experience a sense of affinity. Not because we share the same opinions, but because we appear to value many of the same things.

The artisan at the centre of the essay is such a figure.

Through his treatment of materials, his respect for craft, his regard for tradition, place and workmanship, he appeared to embody many of the qualities I most admire. As the essay developed, I found myself less interested in the shoes than in the relationship emerging between two people who seemed to understand the world in broadly similar ways.

Then came the leather. Not as compromise, but as excellence.

Not as a failure of values, but as their fullest expression. The moment mattered because it revealed something more interesting than contradiction. It revealed the limits of consensus.

We often imagine that shared values naturally lead to shared conclusions. That if people are thoughtful enough, careful enough and sincere enough, they will eventually agree about what is good. Yet life repeatedly presents us with examples of decent people who share many fundamental values and nevertheless arrive at very different understandings of what those values demand.

The essay does not attempt to resolve that tension. Indeed, one of its ambitions is to resist resolution. Too often essays become vehicles for conclusions already reached. I am interested in essays as places of observation; places where a question can be examined without being immediately answered.

Increasingly, I find myself reserving the term essay for writing that remains genuinely exploratory. Not the presentation of a conclusion already reached, but an attempt to understand something not yet fully understood. A place of observation rather than advocacy. A place where writer and reader may linger with a question long enough for it to reveal more of itself.

It may also be that this is a heritage thing. Or perhaps a geographical one. Living among the hills and small communities of rural France, I find myself less interested than I once was in advancing conclusions and more interested in living with observation. Montaigne, not so very far from here, understood the essay as an attempt rather than a verdict. Increasingly, I find that the practice of essay writing is teaching me the same perspective. That understanding often follows observation, and that the most interesting questions have a habit of becoming larger.

In that sense, The Espadrilles is less an argument than a landscape. It begins with one contradiction and ends in the presence of another. The purpose is not to tell the reader what to think, but to lead them into the field and allow them to look around for themselves. To turn their head from side to side, accommodate themselves to the breeze, and observe what becomes visible when the need for immediate answers subsides.

Whether it succeeds is for others to decide.

For my part, I am simply grateful to the artisan, the workshop, the scent of magnolia, and a box containing some of Navarre's finest leather for revealing a question I had not known I was carrying.

David Marshall Montory