Book One: The Lost Origins of the Essay

If we were confused by what exactly an essay is, with the help of John D' Agata we're even more unclear now. And this is O.K. and completely necessary to the exploratory and creative process in essay  writing. The Lost Origins of the essay gives the form an historical context, and elaborates on the core ILC question, which is left purposefully vague right now: What is an essay? Montaigne writes, "what do I know?" But maybe a question focusing  on the "purpose" and "intent" of the essay fails to consider the unwieldy nature of the artistic form and what human discovery comes from outside of static rules and syntactical structure? Instead, D' Agata asks: "Do we read nonfiction to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?" It's safe to say that nonfiction, in the context of his Anthology, means essays.

The material within spans from 1500 B.C.E to 1974. 48 essays in whole: beautiful, insane, abstract, spiritual, drunken, annoying, rambling, most all without a thread of thesis or "point" whatever that means, which just spawns more and more questions.

In the shadow of this first text, the initial question, what is an essay and any initial gripes with the academic type, seem unimportant. Form doesn't seem to matter here. What are we proving? What is the worth in proving anything, other than showing that we have read material and can willingly recite what we know?

Did the writers within this anthology think about five paragraphs or a thesis? What were they trying to explore in their writing? What were they conveying about themselves and the history their writing was filtered through? Their culture? The moment. The lifetime. What does the essay tell us about being human?

Maybe the essay asks a question instead  of providing an answer? Can there even be just one answer?