The Age of the Essay and the age of the blog

Pre.S.[ie a PS written after the rest but put before the main text]: as you will see the essay this comments on I found pretty stimulating. I commend it to you.

This is facinating. Not only giving the history of 'the essay' and of English as an academic subject but some insightful history of the modern university. This is a must-read kind of thing for people engaged in the modern university and, well, education generally.

I liked this quote: "Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.".Said like a true extravert. It's certainly true for me: the act of expressing actually creates a dialogue between what I think I might think and the emerging text which stands for the hypothesized reader. I sometimes discover, having written [or having said] that I don't really think what I thought I thought [!] -or at least my thinking has evolved and grown in the act of expression. This brings in the link between the word essay in English and 'essai' [=try or test] in French. An Essay is trying out an idea or a set of ideas and seeing whether they 'fly'.

Then this also chimes with my experience; "Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well." -Perhaps this is part of the point of blogging for some of us: it forces us to a greater depth and clarity of response to whatever it is that attracts our attention enough to decide to blog about. Again I can see how that seems to be the case for me. Though unlike an essay we can just leave things hanging on a blog. But maybe that's no bad thing; being in process is okay. As Paul Graham says: "An essay has to come up with answers. They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don't publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know." -so blogging is the essays that don't get polished or necessarily come to conclusions and are much more 'in pocess' thinking. We do publish the experiments and we don't necessarily think we have to come up with answers [how pomo darling]. In fact it is a more comunitarian thing: we are inviting others to contribute to the thinking through: we are seeking to be resourced as well as to resource.

I particularly like the idea that an essay should aim to find a surprise rather than flow down a predictable course. just as in life we should collect surprises rahter than simply confirmations of what we thought we knew already.And it ain't cool, therefore: "People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken. And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tell you, is nil admirari. When you're mistaken, don't dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one will notice."

The more I look into learning, the more I realise that life-coaching is tapping into something immensly important. Life-coaching is about being a leanring facilitator. One of the things a coach needs to become skilled at is curiosity; the habit of noticing that there is something interesting going on and then pursuing it. As Paul says, "make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway, just as the conversation of people who are especially proud of something always tends to lead back to it.".

So much to think about here. One of the truly interesting pieces of writing of the last few months for me.