Essay

Based on Wikipedia: Essay

A thousand years ago, a Japanese court lady picked up her brush and began writing down whatever came to mind—stray observations about palace life, complaints about visitors who overstayed their welcome, musings on the beauty of snow falling at dawn. She called the result her "pillow book," as if it were nothing more than notes scribbled before sleep. She had no idea she was inventing a literary form that would take Europe another five centuries to discover.

The essay, it turns out, is far older and stranger than the version most of us encountered in school.

The Art of the Attempt

The word itself comes from the French essayer—to try, to attempt. When the sixteenth-century French nobleman Michel de Montaigne first used the term to describe his writings in 1580, he meant it almost as an apology. These weren't polished treatises or systematic arguments. They were attempts. Tries. Experiments in thinking on paper.

Montaigne was a man who retired to his castle's tower library after a career in law and public service, surrounded by a thousand books, and spent the rest of his life asking himself questions. What do I actually know? Why do I fear death? What is it like to be a cannibal? His essays wandered where his mind wandered—through classical quotations, personal anecdotes, philosophical puzzles, and observations about kidney stones.

This is the essay's origin story: not a school assignment with a five-paragraph structure, but a wealthy Frenchman in a tower, trying to figure out what he thought about things by writing them down.

Three Worlds to Inhabit

The novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley—best known for Brave New World—once tried to map the territory of the essay form. He proposed that essays exist somewhere within a triangle defined by three poles.

At one corner sits the personal and autobiographical. Essayists who work here write fragments of reflective memoir, viewing the world through what Huxley called "the keyhole of anecdote and description." They're telling you about themselves, using their own experience as the lens through which to understand everything else.

At another corner lies the objective, the factual, the concrete particular. These essayists turn their attention outward—to science, politics, literature—and their craft consists of presenting evidence, making judgments, and drawing conclusions. They rarely mention themselves at all.

The third corner belongs to abstraction and universality. Here live the essayists who work in the realm of pure ideas, dealing with philosophical concepts without getting personal or even particularly concrete.

Huxley's insight was this: the best essays don't camp out at any single pole. They move between all three. An essay might begin with a personal anecdote, zoom out to examine relevant facts, and then rise to some larger truth about human nature—before dropping back down to the particular again.

This explains why the form resists easy definition. An essay can be a confession, a polemic, a meditation, an argument, or all of these at once.

The English Appropriation

Montaigne liked to imagine his family was of English extraction—a bit of genealogical fancy that led him to call the English his "cousins." Whether or not the bloodline was real, the intellectual connection certainly was. The English took to essays with enthusiasm.

Francis Bacon published the first English essays just five years after Montaigne's death. Where Montaigne rambled and digressed and questioned, Bacon dispensed wisdom in tight, polished aphorisms. His essays read less like explorations and more like conclusions—compact bundles of worldly advice on topics like truth, death, and the proper management of gardens.

The two founders of the essay form could hardly have been more different. Montaigne meandered; Bacon marched. Montaigne doubted; Bacon pronounced. Yet both were recognizably writing essays—attempts to work out ideas on paper, addressed to an intelligent general reader.

By the eighteenth century, the essay had become the house style of English periodical journalism. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele founded The Tatler in 1709, using it as a storehouse for their essays on manners, morals, and daily life in London. Samuel Johnson followed with his own periodical essays in the 1750s. The line between "essay" and "article" blurred—if you were writing short nonfiction prose for a magazine, you were essentially writing essays.

This was the essay's first great democratization. What had begun as a gentleman's private exercise became a public form of conversation.

The Japanese Tradition

But the English and French weren't first. Not by centuries.

Japanese literature has a form called zuihitsu—literally "following the brush." These are loosely connected essays and fragmented ideas, written wherever the brush leads. The form has existed since nearly the beginning of Japanese writing.

The greatest early example is The Pillow Book, written around the year 1000 by Sei Shōnagon, a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court. It's a collection of lists, anecdotes, observations, and opinions—things that make her heart beat faster, annoying things, elegant things, hateful things. The voice is sharp, funny, opinionated, and utterly personal. It reads, across a millennium, like a particularly sophisticated blog.

Three centuries later, the Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō wrote Tsurezuregusa—"Essays in Idleness"—in what sounds remarkably like Montaigne's spirit: random thoughts written in idle hours. He called them "nonsensical thoughts," which is almost exactly the self-deprecating gesture Montaigne would make when calling his work mere "attempts."

The parallel is striking. On opposite sides of the world, writers independently discovered the same form: the personal, discursive, exploratory prose piece. The essay, it seems, is not a European invention but a human one—a natural way of thinking on paper that multiple cultures found on their own.

The Chinese Counter-Example

Not every culture celebrated the wandering essay. In China, the imperial examination system demanded a very different kind of writing: the eight-legged essay.

For centuries during the Ming and Qing dynasties, aspiring government officials had to demonstrate their merit through standardized examinations. The eight-legged essay—so called for its eight-part structure—was the required format. Candidates had to display their knowledge of Confucian classics and argue within extremely rigid formal constraints.

There was no room for personal voice or creative exploration. The opposite, in fact: innovation was actively penalized. The form was designed to test conformity, discipline, and mastery of tradition.

Some historians argue this rigid essay culture contributed to China's cultural stagnation in the nineteenth century. Whether or not that's fair, the eight-legged essay represents an alternative path—the essay as examination, as proof of orthodox knowledge, rather than as exploration or play.

It's the shadow version of Montaigne's essays: where he used the form to question everything, the Chinese examination essay demanded that writers demonstrate their acceptance of established wisdom.

The Essay at School

If you grew up in the United States or Canada, you probably first encountered the essay as an assignment. The five-paragraph essay. The thesis statement. The supporting points. The conclusion that restates the thesis.

This bears about as much resemblance to Montaigne's essays as paint-by-numbers bears to Rembrandt. But it's not nothing. The school essay exists because educators needed a way to teach structured thinking and clear argumentation. It works, more or less, for that purpose.

The problem comes when students graduate believing that this is what an essay is. The form they learned—introduction, three body paragraphs, conclusion—was invented for classroom efficiency, not literary expression. It's a scaffold, not an architecture.

Real essays breathe. They digress. They circle back. They surprise themselves. The writer of a genuine essay doesn't know exactly where they'll end up when they begin—they're following the thought, seeing where it leads.

College admissions essays sit awkwardly between these two worlds. They ask for personal voice and authentic reflection while simultaneously demanding a certain kind of performance. Students must be genuine—but strategically so. It's Montaigne filtered through marketing.

The Essayist's Toolbox

The forms essays can take are almost unlimited. A partial inventory:

The narrative essay tells a story. It uses the techniques of fiction—scene, dialogue, flashback—but applies them to real events. The writer shapes experience into meaning.

The descriptive essay renders a subject through sensory detail. The goal is to make readers see, hear, smell, or feel something. Good description creates a dominant impression—not just information about a place or thing, but an experience of it.

The argumentative essay stakes a claim and defends it. This is the essay as persuasion, marshaling evidence and logic toward a conclusion. It's the form closest to the five-paragraph school essay, though in skilled hands it becomes something far more sophisticated.

The expository essay explains. How something works. What something means. Why something matters. The writer is a guide, leading readers through unfamiliar territory.

The cause and effect essay traces connections: this happened, and therefore that happened. It maps the chains of consequence that link events together.

The compare and contrast essay sets things side by side to illuminate both. By seeing how two subjects are alike and different, we understand each one better.

The dialectical essay—beloved of philosophers—makes an argument, then attacks it, then defends it against the attack. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The writer stages a debate with themselves.

And the familiar essay—perhaps the closest to Montaigne's original spirit—speaks to the reader as if to a friend. It balances intellect and emotion, brain and heart, in equal measure. The essayist Anne Fadiman identifies its heyday as the early nineteenth century, with Charles Lamb as its greatest practitioner.

Beyond Writing

The essay has escaped the page.

A film essay uses the techniques of documentary but with an essayist's sensibility—personal, exploratory, interested in ideas rather than just information. Think of the work of directors like Chris Marker or Agnès Varda, who used cameras the way Montaigne used his pen.

A photographic essay tells a story or explores a theme through a sequence of images. The photographs work together, building meaning through their arrangement and juxtaposition, sometimes with accompanying text, sometimes in silence.

Even podcasts and YouTube videos have developed essayistic forms—personal, discursive, following an idea wherever it leads. The medium changes, but the impulse remains: to think in public, to explore a question, to invite readers or viewers or listeners into a mind at work.

The Great Essayists

Every age has its essayists. In the early nineteenth century, England produced a golden generation: William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey. They revived the graceful personal style, writing about books and paintings and opium dreams and the pleasures of roast pig.

Thomas Carlyle's essays—dense, prophetic, strange—influenced readers across the Atlantic, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became America's first great essayist. Emerson's essays are secular sermons, dense with aphorism and inspiration, demanding that readers think for themselves while also telling them exactly what to think.

The twentieth century brought new urgencies. T.S. Eliot wrote essays to explain the modernist revolution in poetry. Virginia Woolf used essays to explore consciousness, gender, and the experience of reading. George Orwell made the essay a tool of political clarity, cutting through propaganda and lies with plain, direct prose.

In France, the critic Sainte-Beuve published weekly newspaper columns—Causeries du lundi, Monday chats—that brought literary criticism to a general audience. Essayists like Théophile Gautier and Anatole France followed.

The essay never died. It just keeps reinventing itself for new contexts and new media.

The Paradox of Length

Essays are supposed to be short. The form's very name suggests something modest—just an attempt, nothing grand.

And yet. John Locke titled his foundational work of empiricist philosophy An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It runs to hundreds of pages. Thomas Malthus called his influential treatise on population An Essay on the Principle of Population. It's essentially a book.

Alexander Pope wrote An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man—both of them poems. In verse.

What are we to make of this? Perhaps the word "essay" here signals something about spirit rather than length. These authors were approaching their subjects in a provisional, exploratory way—testing ideas rather than laying down doctrine. Even at book length, even in heroic couplets, they were attempting rather than declaring.

Or perhaps they just liked how the word sounded.

The Essay's Meaning

What is an essay, finally? A piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, says one definition. But that could describe almost anything.

A prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. Also too broad.

A literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything, suggested Huxley. That's closer—it captures the essay's ambition and its refusal to be contained.

Here's another attempt: the essay is thinking made visible. Not the conclusion, but the process. Not the answer, but the working-out. The essayist invites us to watch a mind engaging with the world, following questions wherever they lead, discovering what it thinks by putting thoughts into words.

This is why essays resist formula. They're not structures to fill in but explorations to undertake. The five-paragraph essay taught in schools is like a training wheel—useful for learning balance, but eventually you have to take it off and ride free.

Montaigne, in his tower, surrounded by books and questions, would recognize a kindred spirit in anyone who sits down to write without quite knowing what they'll say. The essay is still, after all these centuries, an attempt. A try.

That's its genius, and its gift.