Piece think
Supriya Nair
The essay: what a form. Oldfashioned enough to seem like it was left behind in the nineteenth century, juvenile enough to be associated forever with ‘compositions’ devised on ruled note-paper under the exhausted eyes of language teachers in school. To essay something is to try it, but as the name of an endeavour there’s something unfulfilled about it, like you didn’t accomplish what you meant to do.
That’s why writers have loved essays since the dawn of modernity, at least in English. Essays are quests. They are efforts. They’re not compositions, but the opposite – a methodical unsettling of thoughts and styles, of showing readers the smooth subject of a surface, then plumbing one level deeper and then, just as these readers have grown comfortable with the surprise, to tear open the piece and make it something else again. An essay is a story and its criticism, a description and its contradiction, a voice and its echo.