Who are your favourite essayists?
>>24685609FB is pretty good. I reread him just recently. He's better than Montaigne I think because he's more concerned with general truths. Montaigne is really only interested in Montaigne.Chesterton is generally entertaining. He wrote a huge amount and rarely a page goes by without a good point and a nice turn of phrase. (His essays are by far the best part of his output in my opinion.)Samuel Johnson (Rambler, Idler) is decent within his range. He's a bit too concerned with stating things in that balanced, civilized, periwigged 18th-century style. There's not quite enough pungency of metaphor, etc. But that said, there's plenty of good stuff in there.James Thurber wrote a lot of very good very funny essays, often half-way between fact and fiction. "Let Your Mind Alone!" is a typical collection.D. H. Lawrence is not bad. He just goes full-on rant mode as usual, but he does have a lot of intelligence and perception in with the frothing obsession with DARK ANIMAL KNOWLEDGE and QUIVERING LOINS and so on and so forth.Clive James is OK. Cultural Amnesia is very readable, if you can get past the annoying Jew-worship. (He did grow up in the 1950s with his father having been killed fighting in WWII so I guess it's asking a bit much for him to have a nuanced view on certain matters.)
>>24685609Montaigne, precisely because he is too unpretentious to profess anything like general truths. There is a kind of exuberant joy in perfect concert with the classical honesty he possesses, such that one gets both breadth and depth in just the right amount, neither shallow nor profound to the point of indecency, and in his observations fluid yet not promiscuous. Nietzsche described his loquacity as a "loquacity which comes from delight in ever new modifications of the same idea." Whereas most essayists are guilty of conceptualising with a heavy hand to the point of reduction, he is a thinker who only finds himself in the manifoldness of being, or in other words, an essayist. Truly, the first to do it and yet one of the only to get it right.>The joy of living on this earth is increased by the existence of such a man.
>>24685609Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
