“In reading an essay, I want to feel that I’m communing with a real person, and a person who cares about what he or she is writing. The words sound sentimental and trite, but the qualities are rare. For me, the ideal essay is not an assignment, to be dispatched efficiently and intelligently, but an exploration, a questioning, introspection. I want to see a piece of the essayist. I want to see a mind at work, imagining, spinning, struggling to grasp, and I won’t either. When you care about something, you continually grapple with it, because it is alive in you. It thrashes and moves, like all living things. When I’m reading a good essay, I feel that I’m going on a journey. The essayist is searching for something and taking me along. That something could be a particular idea, an unraveling of identity, a meaning in the wallow of observation and facts. The facts are important but never enough. An essay, for me, must go past the facts of the essayists own history, the personal memoir, are insufficient alone. Then facts of personal history provide anchor, but the essayist then swings in a wide arc on his anchor line, testing and pulling hard.”-Alan Lightman
The quote that Alan Lightman made on his perspective of an essay is very interesting and original. When I first read the quote I thought for a second that I personally may have subconsciously written this because how Lightman feels about essays is extremely compatible to the way I view them as well.
When I am given an essay to write, I always write them more fluently and with more emotion when the topic to be written on is something I personally care for. Also, when writing about something I enjoy my mind tends to wander and my ideas on the subject begin to become more elaborate in nature. My views start to become more universal and almost persuasive and what I’m expressing seems to be relative to other people’s ideas. My writing starts to relate to my audience.
One thing about essay s being written in a non-concrete form is you really get to experience the essay and the writer. Like Lightman said, an essay becomes more enjoyable when you feel like the essay your reading is sentimental and imaginative. Essays in my view are to be unconventional, and give the reader a new experience every time someone reads your work, because no one wants to sit down to read an essay and become bored with the format or the concrete writing style, you want to keep the audience entertain and that’s the concept I believe Alan Lightman is attempting to portray.
My opinion and response to the quote is completely compliant to the views that Lightman is trying to express. Concrete and unimaginative essays are a bore to read. No essay is unreadable; it is just simply more pleasant to read an essay that has a more innovative composition.
