by Hilton Als
What to me is most important from a literary and philosophical point of view is the extent to which Montaigne created the essay as an exercise in self-scrutiny and free inquiry. As Emerson suggests, through Montaigne the essay became closely, and perhaps permanently, identified with a skeptical sensibility. The essays were forms of expression new to the world and for centuries they characterized what it is like to possess an open and inquiring mind. It remains to be seen whether the future will any longer respect or care for such a mind, with its amazing scope, tolerance for opposing opinions, and delight in trying out—not proselytizing—ideas.
Assuming it can continue to be the humanistic principle it once was, the old (now discredited?) ideal of free and open discussion begins in our dialogues with ourselves. If we don’t continually test even our firmest beliefs and opinions they will calcify into unquestioned dogma. Montaigne knows this; and he knows that there will always be those who welcome such calcification of thought and opinion, who—either for moral, political, or professional reasons—would rather accept dogmatic positions than entertain the expression of opposing perspectives. In an increasingly polarized society, skeptical free inquiry can easily lead to slippery-slope conclusions: you contemplate opinion X or Y or Z, and the next thing you know you’re a bigot, a communist, or a Nazi. For a moment you pace back and forth in your room essaying, and suddenly the reputed tolerant are no longer tolerating.
Stefan Zweig understood the powers of unchecked dogmatism. Escaping from a Nazi-dominated Austria, he accidentally rediscovered the Essais while exiled in Brazil. In his admirable book on Montaigne, written just months before he and his wife committed suicide together, Zweig finds distressing parallels between the essayist’s time and his own troubled era. Although from the outside Montaigne “appeared to be a model citizen,” he lived an exciting and authentic interior life energized by an unrestricted spirit of free inquiry. For Zweig, Montaigne’s skepticism is what kept him free, and Montaigne’s commitment to freedom is what readers should take to heart in troubled times.
“In such epochs where the highest values of life—our peace, our independence, our basic rights, all that makes our existence more pure, more beautiful, all that justifies it—are sacrificed to the demon inhabiting a dozen fanatics and ideologues, all the problems of the man who fears for his humanity come down to the same question: how to remain free?”
And Zweig concludes:
It is to this question and this question alone that Montaigne dedicated his life and his strength . . . And this quest, which he undertakes to safeguard his soul, his liberty, at a moment of universal servility before ideologies and parties, makes him today a brother to us, more intimate than any other artist. If we love and honour him today more than any other, it is because he devoted himself more than any other to the most sublime art of living: rester soi-même.2
“To remain oneself.” That sounds perhaps too static a goal for a personality as mercurial as Montaigne’s. Yet, he knew the self, himself at least, to be a shifting, protean phenomenon, and his own human mutability was exactly what he hoped to record in the essays, just as his near-contemporary and admirer William Shakespeare captured it for the stage. To remain oneself is to remain variable. Montaigne often felt divided over issues and decisions, seeing several sides or choices at once, or different sides or choices at different times, and he thought candor and honesty required that we admit our self-contradictions, conflicting views, and turnabouts instead of striving for what might well be an artificial consistency. This, of course, may be where literature separates itself from the world of law and politics, where “flip-flopping” or “walking back” is an unpardonable offense.
Zweig found Montaigne to be an intellectual hero primarily for his ability to maintain a free and inquiring mind in the midst of turmoil and oppression. His book was designed to promote Montaigne’s relevance to a world heading precipitously toward another horrible war. But I’m not sure that Zweig’s argument for Montaigne’s relevance wouldn’t seem romanticized by many readers today. Perhaps Sextus, Montaigne, Emerson, and Zweig would all be considered “bad citizens” now, with their emphasis on the solitary spirit of independent thought as opposed to the solidarity of collective action. Will Montaigne’s essays remain relevant and vital? Will his formidable reputation endure? Will the essay as a mode of unconstrained expression survive? I’m growing skeptical, but I guess it all depends on how much future generations will prize free inquiry and open discussion.
The Best American Essays features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.
To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay (not an excerpt) on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Note that abridgments and excerpts taken from longer works and published in magazines do not qualify for the series but if considered significant they will appear in the Notable list in the back of the volume. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.
Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to:
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Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Also ineligible are essays that have been published in book form—such as a contribution to a collection—but have never appeared in a periodical. All submissions from print magazines must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit clear printed copies of the essays to the address above. Please note: due to the increasing number of submissions from online sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date, author contact information, etc.) cannot be considered. If submitting multiple essays, please include a separate cover sheet with a full citation for each selection.
Writers should keep in mind that—like many literary awards—the essays are selected from a large pool of nominations. Unlike many literary awards, however, writers may nominate themselves. A considerable number of prominent literary journals regularly submit issues to the series, but though we continually reach out with invitations to submit and reminders of deadlines, not all periodicals respond or participate, so writers should be sure to check with their editors to see if they routinely submit to the series.
The deadline for all submissions is February 1 of the year following the year of publication: thus all submissions of essays published in 2018 must be received by February 1, 2019. There is no fixed reading period, but writers and editors are encouraged to submit appropriate candidates as they are published during the year and not wait until the final deadline.
With the passing of William H. Gass late last year, the essay lost one of its great modern practitioners and champions. In the first volume of The Best American Essays, Elizabeth Hardwick paid him tribute by featuring one of his remarkable essays and by relying in her introduction on his memorable distinction between essays and articles. H
is brilliant criticism of prose style and his insights into the aesthetics of the essay have had a lasting impact on this series.
It’s a pleasure each year to thank Nicole Angeloro for her superb editorial talents and uncanny ability to keep everything on track given the tight schedule of an annual book. And for their expertise, a heartfelt thanks to other publishing people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, including Larry Cooper and Megan Wilson. I also want to thank my son, Gregory Atwan, for all of his generous help throughout the year. It was especially enjoyable to work on this thirty-third volume of The Best American Essays with one of my favorite essayists and critics, Hilton Als. He brought to this edition a sensibility keenly attuned to the varieties of literary and artistic performance. This volume of twenty-four essays expresses a multiplicity of passions and perspectives; it is both highly eclectic and—as readers will detect—subtly interlaced.
R.A.
Notes
1. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). I use this translation throughout.
2. Stefan Zweig, Montaigne, translated by Will Stone (London: Pushkin Press, 2015).
Introduction
Some months ago—actually it’s over a year now—I moved from one part of Manhattan to another. The distance wasn’t tremendous, less than a mile, but the psychological shift was sizable: I was vacating a kind of way station that passed as a home for a room of my own. Even though I’d lived in the apartment I was leaving for over twenty years, I’d shared it with a number of friends, some gone now, and too many ideas about what constituted generosity and receptivity: if you had a roof over your head, then it behooved you to share it with others, no matter the financial and spiritual cost. Giving might make someone else, anyone else, better.
That was my mother’s ethos; she raised me and my five siblings in Brooklyn. My father did not live with us. He was more or less supported by his mother in her large house not too far way. He had a room in her house, at the very top of it, and it was sacrosanct: you didn’t enter it uninvited. I never questioned my parents’ arrangement; it was the way it was. But in the last years leading up to my leaving my first Manhattan apartment—which, by the way, I’d moved into the year my mother died, in 1989; I was born in 1960—I’d felt crowded in it or, more accurately, crowded out of it.
Let me explain. Even though I ostensibly lived alone in that flat surrounded by piles—books, records, photographs, magazines—my body had been afflicted by emotional piles for a long time before I left all that junk behind. You see, everything I’d learned about hospitality from my mother—she who is every child’s moral barometer, even if she’s broken—had caved in on my soul. I could no longer sustain the platonic soup kitchen I’d been raised to stock, and preside over. I could no longer maintain my mother’s lessons of the heart.
By the end of my stay in my first New York place, all those bodies, sometimes excellent and sometimes not, that had crossed my threshold had impressed themselves on me no matter how the relationship was defined. It didn’t matter if the day-to-day friendship had dissolved, or the person had died, or what have you. Those former friends, bodies, were now a part of my body, and I could no longer bear their weight, or the weight of any of it. Then Love called, rather unexpectedly. Love didn’t so much edge those bodies out as ask for a different place to house itself—a new home with less of everything that was not Love. No Pilgrim’s Progress burdens, or treating time as though it was valuable to others but not to myself. Love taught me that my time was my own. Mine. To say “mine” was evil if you came from the Ma school of things; it was a way of killing off Ma and her brand of goodwill, a way of being like all those others who hurt Ma, and in hurting Ma, hurt me. Love pushed against that. And how “mine” was forbidden when I was growing up.
Our ma supported us in part with “help” from public assistance—welfare. Some images from those days: caseworkers going through her cabinets to make sure she didn’t have a crust of bread or a man or anything that could contribute to her well-being, let alone that of her children. If anything was found, no more government “help.” No more standing with my sister to get welfare food off a truck. No more social workers asking what your daily life is like, as a way of finding out what your mother is up to personally, or whether or not she was mothering you at all. Love pushed against all that, and wanted something else, including the right to ask the questions I never thought of for myself, given that “I” I had been trained by Ma’s idea of love not to love. Another question Love asked: Why didn’t Pa, during all those years of lying and not lying about his absence, give his family any nourishment, take his kids in before making at least one kid sick with tinned meat? Love pushed against all that, and this, too: the feeling that if I had my own place and a lock and key, I would be no better than Pa, wrapped up safe as can be and soft in his cocoon of a room, nursing on the overly sweet milk of self-protection, a mother’s indulgence, constant self-regard. Love assured me that having a space to work, one that wasn’t entirely at the mercy of other people I had known, which is to say Ma’s legacy of giving unto death, didn’t have to be a thing. In fact, it could be dismantled brick by brick, so that out of the prison of Ma’s days I could be a free man taught to praise.
Love was the principal architect of my new place and the principal dissembler of the past. The primary feature of my new apartment is light. There are windows on either end of a floor-through in a part of town notable for its proximity to the Hudson River and its vestiges of bohemian New York: trees, a square, crooked old streets with Dutch or Flemish names. Few if any of us know the stories behind those names. History takes too much time. We are Manhattanites and preoccupied by our lives in Manhattan. Sometimes Love stays for the night, and other nights Love cooks meals, and in between these pleasures there’s the fear of Love removing its presence. How will it go? Must it go? What is it doing now? What is it doing without me? Have I done enough for it to stay? Are you my mother? If you love me enough, will I be my father and lock the door, letting no one in? Love encourages me to get to the desk built in the room where I work, and even to shut the door from his Love in order to get whatever it is I need to get done, done. Love can’t always stay. Love weighs on me, not in the same way those other bodies did in the days when I followed Ma’s ethos to a T. Love is not here sometimes—is out working or making a meal or sitting in a room far off, on the other end of a joke. And yet there is Love’s presence in a disfiguring world. And then there is your disfigured body—the one that is misshapen by words and events Love cannot follow you into and you do not want Love to follow you into, shaped, as it is, by the once-irrefutable loneliness I thought was the world.
The street leading to my house runs east to west, a trajectory that takes you from a once-bad neighborhood to a very nice one. (In any case, it’s difficult to find a bad neighborhood in lower Manhattan now. Everything has been bought and made better here in the land of the plenty, the horn of the good.) I spend several mornings a week on the east side of my block, dealing with personal stuff, including learning how to physically and mentally defend myself against those who do not feel my “I” should exist at all. Sometimes this begins even before Love finds me for the day, or night. That ill wind follows me down my street the way thoughts followed Virginia Woolf down the road in her essay “Street Haunting,” written in 1930:
How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on their surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.
But I am not gliding down the surface of my thoughts as I make my way from the east side of my street down to the west, in part because I am not Virginia Woolf, which is to say, I do not go unobserved in the world of my street, thus making me free to observe in relative safety and peace. In the world of my street I’m observed for a variety of reasons, and this individual and collective surveillance shapes my thoughts and my writing in ways that I resent. Who wouldn’t want to spend an evening walking in search of a pencil and coming back home without incident to think about it? The way I’m observed means my brain can’t sleep as I look; that’s a luxury I can’t afford as I try to not kill the world that means to kill me. From the time I moved into my new home—the windows let in as much nature as is possible in Manhattan—but really several years before that, I felt something in Manhattan that even Love couldn’t protect me from, and what shall I call it? The May I see your ID syndrome?
On my block there’s a big store, part of a chain that sells electronic devices. I’ve been in the shop exactly three times—once to get a device fixed, once to buy a Christmas gift with my white German goddaughter, and once to replace a missing something to fix another device. Each time I’ve gone into the store, done my business, and am about to pay, I’ve been asked for my ID. I am not asleep to the fact that none of the other customers—usually affluent Europeans, yuppie mothers, and the like—are asked for anything but their credit cards once they belly up to the electronic bar to make a purchase. For those of us who are not them, the exchange of capital for goods becomes a kind of sickroom: May I see your ID? The sickroom glows with blood, the blood that floods your face your neck your back as you hand over your ID instead of—what? A fuck-you? And why not a fuck-you? Because the worker who asks you for your ID is black or Hispanic and male, too, and he needs to make a living, even if it’s at someone’s literal and figurative expense. He can’t look at you. (A side note: this is always the point in the story when you become a third-person figure. Your body can’t bear it and so becomes a different body, watching as things happen but trying not to feel, despite the rush of blood to the face the neck the back. In this situation and others like it, your “I” recedes, running further and further back into the hidden world housed in the body the world hates.) He looked at you before, smiling, as you decided to purchase the shit you needed, but all of that changes when he asks, May I see your ID? The tone was the same as it was when he was showing you the junk you needed, friendly like, but now there’s a threat: If you don’t have ID, who are you other than a thieving threat? There’s a bright lift to his voice: May I see your ID? Surely someone trained him to say that, just as my mother and father, respectively, showed me how important it was to despise racism and its various inevitable humiliations, and to empathize with workers who were oppressed by a corporate system that puts their head in a yoke just so they know who’s boss. Who is the slain, who is the victim? Speak! So wrote Sophocles in Antigone, and maybe that’s the start of the essay in my head that I can’t write because of the blood pounding in it as the young man swipes my card and swipes my reason several blocks away from my home, away from Love. The transaction closed, the thing I needed now bagged, weighs heavy in my hand like evil, like shame: Why couldn’t I forgo my mother’s ethos and “read” that young man to filth? Because by not looking at me—May I have your ID?—he was, perhaps, frightened to discover what he would find on the other end of his learned question/inquisition: at the beginning or end of his own street, rocky with the stones of compromise, smiling all the while, the better to survive.