Envisioning the Stranger’s Heart

Abstract

I used to despise essays. In high school I had only a passing acquaintance with them; the few we read, one or two by Bacon, something by E.B. White, and, as I recall, J.B. Priestley, seemed harmless and inconsequential: only somebody’s opinion on something. I first came to rue essays in college, where, in freshman English, we read them so as then to make more of their kind. The implied lesson further diminished their already low status: their value lay solely in their instrumentality. The ones we read in Honors English at Wofford College in 1961— “skimmed” may be more accurate—I did not take seriously, since we hurried through them on the way to producing our own more dismal progeny. If the essays we (sort of) read were merely preparatory, a means to an end, those we wrote served only a local function: academic exercises. Little wonder that essays had fallen into sad disrepute, prompting Joseph Wood Krutch to exclaim ten years earlier: “No essays, please!” Yet we stumbled, mumbled miserably on, dishonoring the form and in the process despoiling the language, writing more and more wretched imitations of the stuff we read. What we wrote bore the appearance of tweed and carried the smell of fustian: its name was irrelevance.