Life as an essay

Over the past few days I've had a really fun e-mail exchange with a friend and former colleague. During our time working together I always looked forward to the conversations we'd share and the e-mail exchange felt like an electronic renaissance of nostalgic proportions. The power of connecting with other humans never ceases to amaze me, and I am constantly left in awe of how much I enjoy gaining insight into the innerworkings of other people's brains.

One of the topics of our exchange included mention of recent books we'd read. I shared my enjoyment of Percival Everett's innovative, complicated, Italo Calvino-esque novel, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell.

In the novel, Everett writes,

"To a considerable degree, by the time we have reached a certain age, it varies for each of us, we have said all we meant to say. Everything else is either a reissue or an elucidation, a gloss. Some utterances might be reconstructions of some erased pages, palimpsests of sorts, but it’s mere repetition."

I asked my friend whether he agreed. His response included the following:

"In basic education, don’t we value repetition: keep writing / revising an essay until you get your point across? What if your life or my life is one long essay that keeps getting rewritten … elucidated … polished."

This idea, in turn, got me thinking about another quote I'd read this week as I prepared to discuss Animal Farm with my 8th grade English class. George Orwell, the novella's author, wrote an essay entitled "Why I write," which includes the following passage:

"All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally."

So where does all of this land me in my own understanding of myself, my students, and this journey of life that we share. Well, I do like the idea that our lives do share similarities with the drafting of an essay, but essays tend to get better and better, right? One would hope that each successive draft is more polished than the last. But any writer will tell you that there is a certain uncertainty to writing, too. An author-friend of mine who has been widely published to great critical acclaim, once confessed that he awakens each morning and has to literally look himself in the mirror and remind himself, "I am a good writer" over and over again.

I wonder, then, whether we might be penning essays that--during our weaker moments of struggle and self-doubt and reinvention possess those invariable moments of rambling fluff, misplaced citations, and blatant instances of plagiarism, along with the decorative adjectives and humbug generally of our lives. They're those "purple passages" where we lost the thread of thesis that was stringing everything together so nicely at the outset. Hopefully we all find the course again and the next chapter regains the magic that drew us (and our readers) in during that jaw-dropping introduction.

Life humbles us and can certainly be a "horrible, exhausting struggle," but there is also that opportunity for editing, revising, and refreshing the narrative. The characters have staying power, but the delivery and the elucidation of the soul of our writing--our lives--can, and does, evolve.