The Essayist's Notebook

This note grows out of two earlier observations, and an essay I am currently crafting. The first concerns the kinetic energy of the essay: the sense that thought is not a static object but something that emerges through movement. The second arises from Montaigne's declaration that he writes de bonne foi; not simply in good faith, but from a position of fidelity to his own experience. The essay is titled A Fragment of Clarity. These may be the same question viewed from different directions.

A thought is rarely born complete. It emerges through movement.

As expressed in an earlier note, the musical octave provides a useful analogy. No single note contains an octave. The octave emerges only in the relation between two notes. The notes are recognisably the same and unmistakably different. Meaning arises not from either note alone, but from the interval between them.

Thought often behaves in the same way. An idea seldom arrives fully formed. It emerges through movement between perceptions, between formulations, between one understanding and the next. The insight lies not at either end of the journey, but in the relation that connects them.

This is why I have become interested in what I call cognitive choreography. Thought is not simply a collection of ideas arranged on a page. It is a sequence of movements, turns, hesitations, reversals, and recognitions. The meaning resides not only in what is thought, but in the movement through which the thought becomes possible. The essay preserves something of that movement.

But movement alone is not enough. A dance without resistance is merely motion. A thought without resistance is merely assertion. Here the notebook becomes important. Writing with pen and paper slows the process sufficiently for the thought to encounter itself. A sentence appears on the page and immediately becomes available for inspection. The question that follows is rarely intellectual. It is not primarily:

“Can I defend this?”

Nor:

“Can I prove this?”

Nor even:

“Is this factually correct?”

Instead there is a quieter question:

“Do I believe this?”

Or perhaps more precisely:

“In my heart of hearts, does this feel true?”

This is not a test of certainty. It is a test of fidelity.

The French essayer means to try, attempt, or test. The essay is therefore not simply an act of expression. It is an act of examination. A thought is placed upon the page precisely so that it may be tested.

What interests me increasingly is that this testing occurs not only between thought and subject, but between thought and self. A sentence acquires force because it survives repeated encounters with the person who wrote it.

The kinetic energy of the essay may therefore arise from more than movement between ideas. It may arise from movement between thought and conscience, thought and experience, thought and self. Every revision asks two questions simultaneously:

What do I mean?

And:

Am I persuaded by what I mean?

The second question is the more difficult.

It cannot be answered by logic alone.

It requires an encounter with oneself.

This may also explain why Montaigne's phrase de bonne foi continues to trouble me. The essay is not founded on certainty. It is founded on fidelity. Not fidelity to doctrine, nor ideology, nor even conclusion, but fidelity to experience as honestly perceived. Perhaps it is fidelity to self. I do not know. But without such fidelity, cognitive choreography becomes intellectual performance. Without movement, fidelity becomes mere sincerity. The essay requires both.

Perhaps this is the connection I have been searching for. The essay preserves the movement of thought, but that movement takes place under a particular discipline: a willingness to test every formulation against one's own deepest apprehension of truth. Not truth as certainty. Not truth as authority. But truth as that which remains believable after rhetoric, vanity, performance, and wishful thinking have been stripped away.

The essay, then, is not a search for what can be said. It is a search for what can still be believed after it has been said. And perhaps the kinetic energy of the essay is nothing other than the trace left behind by that search.

David Marshall Montory