Archive 2025
January 10, 2025
from The Message
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Facing his demons head on, he got to ‘the general through the specific’ which is what all great essayists do.”—THE
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include Between the World and Me, The Water Dancer and The Message. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University. In 2023 Mary Wood, a white teacher from South Carolina, insisted on teaching Between the World and Me, despite threats of being fired by the school board. Coates traveled to South Carolina to support her.
The Paragraph of the Week is from his newest book, The Message, in which he describes his reaction to the event.
The Paragraph of the Week
The following afternoon, I met Mary for barbecue. I was actually giddy from the night before. I had expected to come into a den of hectoring fanatics. And instead I'd found that there were allies fighting back. Allies. When I started writing, it felt essential to think of white people as readers as little as possible, to reduce them in my mind, to resist the temptation to translate. I think that was correct. What has been surprising—pleasantly so—is that there really is no translation needed, that going deeper actually reveals the human. Get to the general through the specific, as the rule goes. Still, even as I have come to understand this, it feels abstract to me. What I wanted was to be Mary for a moment, to understand how she came to believe that it was worth risking her job over a book.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
Comment
When he writes his books, Ta-Nehisi Coates pictures a black audience. In Between the World and Me he writes directly to his son, and in The Message, his most recent book, he has in mind his writing students at Howard University. “When I started writing, it felt essential to think of white people as readers as little as possible,” he explains, “to reduce them in my mind, to resist the temptation to translate.” But when Mary Wood, the white teacher from South Carolina, risked her job by assigning his book, he learned that a white audience too got the message about systemic racism precisely because he did not “translate” and was honest about his own experiences and the long history of oppression in America and around the world. Facing his demons head on, he got to “the general through the specific” which is what all great essayists do. Identity may have been the vehicle for such honesty, but in the end his books affirm that the human condition is what matters.
—THE
January 17, 2025
from “Montaigne”
in Representative Men
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“...the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
In his last book, Three Roads Back, Robert D. Richardson, a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, wrote about the way grief led Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James to insights about their common theme, resilience. “What all three writers and thinkers teach, through their lives as much as their writing is how to recover from losses, how to get up after being knocked down, and how to construct prosperity out of the wreckage of disaster.”
Our Paragraph of the Week is from Emerson’s essay “Montaigne” and the commentary is from the postscript to Richardson’s book. Taken together, they provide the solace of the long view when society appears to have taken another calamitous course.
[Note: We made slight changes in the formatting of the original Richardson commentary to fit our two-paragraph format.]
Paragraph of the Week
The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one thing and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral, the result is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and by knaves as by martyrs the just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Commentary
There is a lot of resilience hidden in that word “somehow.” Resilience is not in general quirky or unusual, nor is it a resource available only to those of iron will who can alter their views or transcend their feelings. Resilience is built into us and into things. Of the persons treated in this book, Emerson had the most profound and nuanced understanding of the real nature of resilience, and of the extent to which we, and all of nature, are caught up in it. Emerson called the process “compensation.” That is the title of the third essay in his Essays First Series (1841). The subject had fascinated him since childhood, he tells us, and he began to seriously work up the subject for a series of lectures he gave in 1837. In 1839, the year his daughter Ellen was born, he was still working on it. Coming right after “History” and “Self-Reliance,” “Compensation" remains a crucial leg of Emerson's thought, and the best single statement of how the resilience we sometimes feel in ourselves is in truth a universal law or force, discernable anywhere one looks. Resilience is part of the nature of things.
—Robert D. Richardson
January 24, 2025
from “Origin Stories”
in sweet
by Joe Bonomo
“I silently begged, pleaded with Molly to talk to me.”—Joe Bonomo
Joe Bonomo is the author of eight books of prose including the essay collection Field Recordings from the Inside and the award-winning collection of prose poems, Installations. Today’s Paragraph of the Week is from “Origin Stories” which I found in sweet magazine. You can read the full piece here.
The Paragraph of the Week
I silently begged, pleaded with Molly to talk to me. Anything, I won’t tell! I’d gently hold her warm mutt head in my hands, bend her dog face to mine, lock eyes, hers brown and soulful, and implore her: say something, anything. Let me know that what I know is true. Say something. In the craziest moments, we came close. So I felt. Close to talking. What would she say? What language would she use to mend the cleavage between animals? This I must know. Say something, anything, I won’t tell! What I really didn’t know—beyond if she could, or would she, or what she’d say, what complaints or agreements or backyard or rec room secrets she’d whimper—was where I’d go if I heard her right, what world I’d tumble into, what world I’d leave behind, if Molly said.
—Joe Bonomo
Commentary
In the opening paragraph of “Origin Stories,” Joe Bonomo yearns to enter the world before language to see if his words are true. Gazing into the eyes of his dog Molly, the “warm mutt head” close to his, her face turned toward him, the eyes “locked” and “soulful,” he longs to “mend the cleavage between men and animals,” and at times, “in the craziest moments,” Molly on the verge of speech comes “close.” All dog lovers, I suspect, share this desire to be in on their dog’s secrets, curious about the complaints and words of gratitude their dogs might offer, though such mundane concerns do not ultimately drive the writer here. He longs to probe a more essential mystery about language. In this prose piece about origins, he wants know what world he would “tumble into” if he could understand her speech, and, most tellingly, what, if anything, in the world of words he leaves behind is true.
—THE
February 7, 2024
from “The Resistance Will Not Be Rushed”
in The Washington Post, January 29, 2025
by Anne Lamott
“Do what’s possible.”—Father Tom Weston
Anne Lamott is the author of seven novels and several bestselling books of nonfiction, including, Operating Instructions, Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son, and a classic book on writing, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. “The Resistance Will Not Be Rushed” appeared in The Washington Post, last month. You can read the full essay in the Washington post here and, for followers of Facebook and X, for free here.
The Paragraph of the Week
I think we need and are taking a good, long rest. Along with half of America, I have been feeling doomed, exhausted and quiet. A few of us, approximately 75 million people, see the future as a desert of harshness. The new land looks inhospitable. But if we stay alert, we’ll notice that the stark desert is dotted with growing things. In the pitiless heat and scarcity, we also see shrubs and conviction.
—Anne Lamott
Commentary
Anne Lamott is urging love not complacency. She passes on the advice of her Jesuit friend, Father Tom Weston, to “do what’s possible.” To be “kind to ourselves,” “take care of the poor,” “get hungry kids fed,” and “pick up the litter.” When she quotes Molly Ivins who said “Sweet Pea, we got our horse shot right out from under us,” Lamott adds “it hurts like hell and we loved that horse, and people are laughing at us.” Yes, pain, grief, and humiliation are what we suffer now. We need a rest. She insists, though, that the stillness of now is like the calm before a dessert storm, and the blast of spring will come. See the “dubious patches of pale green” down by the arroyo? It’s already begun.
—THE
February 14, 2025
from “Old Fashioneds”
in Broken Open
by Martha Gies
“If you use Seagram’s 7, you’ll save some money, but that may not matter. Life runs out before the money does anyway.”—Martha Gies
Martha Gies began as a journalist writing profiles of musicians and filmmakers, but after studying with Raymond Carver turned to short fiction and essays. The Paragraph of the Week is from her second collection of essays, Broken Open, published by Trail to Table Press in 2024.
The Paragraph of the Week
For Old Fashioneds, my family always used Seagram's 7, an inexpensive blend that served as the house whiskey. Though they kept a fully stocked bar for their friends, from British gin to Grand Marnier, my parents regularly drank Seagram's, even after Father began making money in the law practice. Once, as an amusement, he calculated how much he had saved over the years by not drinking a good bonded bourbon. He sidled up to Mother at the stove, slipped his arm around her waist, and revealed the astonishing sum. Like much of what my father said, his announcement aimed to make her laugh, and she threw back her head and rewarded him a generous throaty yelp.
—Martha Gies
Commentary
Martha Gies uses this paragraph to set up her essay about the day she discovered her father was dying. Since the age of eight, she was in charge of making the Sunday Old Fashioneds using sugar, bitters, Seagram 7, and a maraschino cherry. One Sunday on a winter break from college her father came from the porch as she was making the drinks. She turned to him as he entered under the archway “handsome at forty-eight, with dark eyes, and a crew cut now turning gray” wearing a sports shirt and slacks. While they looked at each other, “his knees buckled. He sagged, then caught himself, recovering instantly,” and she knew he was dying. “A look of fury came momentarily into his face, and his eyes said, You didn’t see a thing.”
—THE
February 21, 2025
from “The Art at the End of the World”
in The Best American Essays 2018
by Heidi Julavits
“But on the jetty I understood what Smithson intuited so long ago in Rome: beauty did not need us.”—Heidi Julavits
Heidi Julavits is the author of four novels and a collection of essays entitled The Folded Clock: A Diary. I found her essay “The Art at the End of the World” in The Best American Essays 2018. In it she travels with her husband and her two children—her “crows” as she affectionately calls the kids—to the “Spiral Jetty,” a work of land art in the Great Salt Lake built in the 1970’s by Robert Smithson. In the Paragraph of the Week she describes the despair combined with an odd, apocalyptic exhilaration that seeing the site of the earthwork provokes. Fortunately, she is not the only one on this trip.
The Paragraph of the Week
At the jetty I became entirely irrelevant, and the result was even more exhilarating. Smithson, when searching for a framework with which to explore both limits and limitlessness, found useful the concept of entropy, i.e., the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy proved intriguing to him because, as he understood it, energy was “more easily lost than obtained” and thus, “in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness.” I experienced that ultimate future. I experienced what the planet would be like when we were, every one of us, gone. I had, before our visit, worried not only about my crows but also about the loneliness of a planet that might someday have no one to see it, walk through it, feel intense things because of it. That is what made my brain and my heart fold in on themselves. Cities, yes, gone; ice caps, gone; but the beauty of the planet routed through a human consciousness, that's what I couldn't comprehend vanishing. This was what, more than my own particular death, I'd despaired at. But on the jetty I understood what Smithson intuited so long ago in Rome: beauty did not need us.
—Heidi Julavits
Commentary
“The world is slowly destroying itself,” Robert Smithson explained, describing the ecological disaster we all face. “The catastrophe comes suddenly, but slow.” His earthwork, a large spiral rock formation built into a desert lake, suggests the contradiction as it rarely appears except in times of drought and is crumbling into nothingness over time. Heidi Julavits brought to this earth art her biggest fear from human annihilation due to climate change: “Cities, yes, gone; ice caps, gone; but the beauty of the planet routed through a human consciousness, that's what I couldn't comprehend vanishing.” Looking at the bleak but glorious “Spiral Jetty,” she realizes what its creator intended—“beauty does not need us”—and finds consolation in the idea. I don't. What makes this sense of the end heartbreaking for me are her crows—her children—who have no sense of the end. Rather than read stories with traditional endings they play Minecraft that goes on endlessly and consists of “patterns and repetitions.” City kids, grumpy at having to go on a desert trip, they complain about the Utah scenery: “Everything is dead here,” one crow says looking out the car window while the littler crow makes up a song repeating the phrase “no people” over and over. And yet, the children delight in the cows that they see on the road to the lake and when they reach “The Spiral Jetty,” the author’s epiphany does become irrelevant as they respond with delight “cutting across” the puddles “between the concentric rings” of the earth sculpture and writing their names in the sand, routing a bit of the planet through the miracle of their “human consciousness.” It is probably true that beauty does not need us, but it’s a damned shame.
—THE
February 28, 2025
from “Stop and Frisk”
in Citizen
by Claudia Rankine
“You are not the guy and still you fit the description.”—Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is the author of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Nothing in Nature is Private, and Citizen: An American Lyric. We at THE have long been interested in work such as hers which crosses genres, inhabiting that place where prose, poetry, and film meet. Our Paragraph of the Week is a montage from her prose poem “Stop and Frisk” in Citizen. After you read it and the commentary you can click on the link to see the brief film version that Rankine made in collaboration with filmmaker John Lucas.
This feature is a reprise from 2020. It is number eight in our celebration of ten years of The Humble Essayist.
Paragraph of the Week
Everywhere were flashes, a siren sounding and a stretched-out roar. Get on the ground. Get on the ground now. Then I just knew….And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description. You can’t drive yourself sane. This motion wears a guy out. Our motion is wearing you out and still you are not that guy…. Get on the ground. Get on the ground now….Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn’t begin the same way, each time it begins it’s the same. Flashes, a siren, the stretched-out roar….And still you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.
—Claudia Rankine
Commentary
Reading Claudia Rankine is discovering that you missed the point which is the point. It is like losing the thread of the argument which was the argument all along. You read “everywhere were flashes” and “you are not the guy and still you fit the description,” and “each time it begins the same way, it doesn’t begin the same way, each time it begins the same.” Over and over you read and think there is some problem with the writing, until you realize you’re the problem. As she puts it, “you can’t drive yourself to sane.” Reading Claudia Rankine is like watching an off-balance basketball player take a shot that should never go in, but goes in anyway. It is like looking at the stars until they all begin spinning. No, that’s you. You fit that description. You’re the one spinning.
—THE
March 7, 2025
from “An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow”
by Richard Steele
in The Art of the Personal Essay
edited by Phillip Lopate
“The mind in infancy is, methinks, like the body in embryo; and receives impressions so forcible, that they are as hard to be removed by reason.”—Richard Steele
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele popularized the eighteenth-century English essay in their two newssheet periodicals, The Tatler and The Spectator. As Phillip Lopate points out, they were “familiar essayist more often than personal ones,” but “An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow” is the exception. In it Richard Steel dedicates several hours to “revive the old places of grief” in his life. One is his home when his father died and he entered the room where his mother wept before the coffin. This indelible childhood moment created an “unmanly gentleness of mind” in himself that he regrets, except that it allows him to “indulge...in the softnesses of humanity” and remember the past with “sweet anxiety.”
I have taken the liberty of dividing a single paragraph by Steele in two since the second half seems to provide an excellent commentary on the first.—THE
Paragraph of the Week
The first sense of sorrow I ever knew was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of age; but was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling Papa; for, I know not how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there. My mother caught me in her arms, and, transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces; and told me in a flood of tears, Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again.
—Richard Steele
Commentary
She was a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which, methought, struck me with an instinct of sorrow, that, before I was sensible of what it was to grieve, seized my very soul, and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since. The mind in infancy is, methinks, like the body in embryo; and receives impressions so forcible, that they are as hard to be removed by reason, as any mark with which a child is born is to be taken away by any future application. Hence it is, that good nature in me is no merit; but having been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of any affliction, or could draw defences from my own judgment, I imbibed commiseration, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities; and from whence I can reap no advantage, except it be, that, in such a humour as I am now in, I can the better indulge myself in the softnesses of humanity, and enjoy that sweet anxiety which arises from the memory of past afflictions.
—Richard Steele
March 14, 2025
“Ice”
by Maureen Seaton
in Little Ice Age
“That’s how prose poems come to me, the sound of the words arriving first, no interruptions, no restraints, the rhythm kicking in.”—Maureen Seaton
Maureen Seaton was at first anxious about her move from linear poetry to the prose poem. “Poem lovers expect air on the page, gulps of negative space after lines, between stanzas, allowing for breath,” she writes. “And there I was creating claustrophobia.” One of her students called her prose poems “stubby creatures” and she herself worried about her “ungainly chunks of text.” Eventually she embraced the form—"all horizon and velocity”—and rarely looked back. Prose poems she discovered could contain anything: “boxes on boxes filled with jetsam and doubloons.” Writing them felt like strapping herself in a roller coaster and “riding it all the way down.” Like “opening a vein” or “baffling the radar” or “balancing mid-air” at the top of a ferris wheel.
Seaton, an American lesbian poet, memoirist, and professor of creative writing, authored fifteen solo books of poetry, co-authored an additional thirteen, and wrote one memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, which won the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography. I found her prose poem “Ice” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry. It is a wild and beautiful ride. Her commentary about the prose poem comes from the essay that accompanied the poem in that collection called “Moving Violations: The Prose Poem as Fast Car.”
The Paragraph of the Week
Ice
We were driving down the Kennedy having a great time guessing old groups Spinners Commodores La Belle maybe I was driving fast we'd been cold for a month not regular cold scary the kind that wears you down twenty forty below dark so cold you know hell is scratchy wool and miles of hard ice forget heat and everything suddenly stopped the Lincoln which was not our Lincoln but my sister's boyfriend's Lincoln not even his but the leased whim of a fired employee crashed into the back of a steel-gray Mercedes Benz you could feel the ice eat your bones your bumpers the plastic grill curling up the back of the Mercedes Jesus that Lincoln imploded good old American the Mercedes owner said as we shook in the ridiculous cold cars whizzing down the frozen highway and Lori's arm shot across my chest like a mother's we'd been spoons sleeping on the sunny couch earlier while the temperature reached a record low in Chicago my ex-husband used to say stop breathing on my back Maureen the only thing I remember about the crash is the way Lori's left arm reached out and saved me from ice crystals on the windshield she said whenever I breathe on her back she melts.
—Maureen Seaton
Commentary
I once unconsciously chose and now consciously choose process over product or artifice. For me, the prose poem provides the perfect container—like any favorite form might—and then it dispenses with the container as well. I spend precious time fitting the text I’ve streamed to the music I hear. It’s still metered, but it’s internal. I hear sounds for particular words too, that's why streaming works well for me—the poem feeds me the sound and sometimes I get it right the first time and sometimes I have to think about the sound and then the sense that's bubbling up and find the sound—like the way the person typing subtitles on live TV goes back and retypes a word or phrase when the meaning catches up. That’s how prose poems come to me, the sound of the words arriving first, no interruptions, no restraints, the rhythm kicking in—my twin turbo six-cylinder cutting through wind—all horizon and velocity.
—Maureen Seaton
March 28, 2025
from “Fallingwater”
in Brevity
by Gretchen Ernster Henderson
“This is a home of water, falling water, falling everywhere.”
—Gretchen Ernster Henderson
Gretchen Ernster Henderson explains on her website that she is a writer, educator, artist, musician, gardener, and body of water. Her fifth book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (Trinity University Press, 2023) is melting into a global poetry project, Dear Body of Water (in partnership with the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center). In 2024, she was an Artist-in-Residence at Fallingwater, a home designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and built above a waterfall. It is the subject of the Paragraph of the Week.
The Paragraph of the Week
This is a home of water, falling water, falling everywhere: over flat roofs and cantilevered terraces, sculpted balconies under drains and downspouts, pooling in flagstones rippled by ancient seas. Water roils in the rising stream below. Rain pools at thresholds, snaking in slivers between stones and stucco, as drips grow to drench on the verge of drowning. I am on solid ground enough to hear instrumental differences. Pattering. Pouring. Water is music. Inside and out—
—this stream defies definition as rain fills crevices, spills down walls and slopes. Seeps spring to life. A statue clasps hands: pleading or in prayer. A sculpted head of Buddha weeps. Descending steps slicken with rising waters, no longer still as a splash but a maelstrom, warning to stop and shrink to human size.
—Gretchen Ernster Henderson
Commentary
“Falling Water” by Gretchen Ernster Henderson spills down the page. It cannot be contained in paragraphs. I know the paragraph of the week looks like two paragraphs, but is it? She has borrowed the technique of enjambment from the poets to let one paragraph of prose spill into the next so that, like a stream, they “defy definition.” “This is the home of water, falling water,” she begins our paragraph of “drains and downspouts” given over to tumbling. “Falling everywhere,” she writes, “pooling,” “snaking in slivers,” its “drips grow on the verge of drowning,” but she sees a countermovement as “the rising stream below—
—fills from above” and “seeps spring to life.” Steps that go up as well as down “slicken with rising waters,” falling and rising meeting in a vortex at her feet, a swirling “maelstrom” with a message, no, a “warning”: “Stop” it says, know your place in the scheme of things, “shrink to human size.”
—THE
April 4, 2025
from “Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain”
in Best American Essays 2023
by Robert Anthony Siegel
“We'll never know whose dream we describe.”
—Robert Anthony Siegel
Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed, and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in Pushcart Prize XXXVI. “Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain” appeared in Best American Essays 2023.
Paragraph of the Week
Karen and I had walked in silence, breathing hard because the trail was steep. The trees met at their tops to form a sort of latticework roof, and the light filtered down, bluish-green, the color of silence. No sound from the outside; our own footsteps inaudible. The feeling was of enclosure: a winter garden filled with a forest, or maybe a memory box by Joseph Cornell the size of the world. It contained a creek and a little wooden bridge at the bottom of the ravine and then a tree the size of an ancient Roman pillar that had fallen over the path, hanging over our heads as we passed underneath. We are here, I thought, one part of the composition, but we can't read its meaning. We'll never know whose dream we describe.
—Robert Anthony Siegel
Commentary
We find at least three dreamers in “Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain” by Robert Anthony Siegel. His mother who cannot walk beyond the corner grocery store without getting lost has largely stopped speaking because she gets lost in words as well, repeating what her son says on the phone, “trying to cobble together a bridge of words” to get through the conversation “without falling.” His wife, Karen, sobs and moans terrified in her sleep, waking him, but not herself, and feels great the next morning “without a hint of fear or sadness.” Robert dreams of leaving a dog in a room for days, letting it starve, and wakes gasping. He also dreams up thirteen sections of this essay filled with images of dreaminess: “moonlight in a darkened room,” “sunlight in an empty glass,” the metal armature on a flatbed train car “floating with great ceremony into the darkness.” “It’s like I’m becoming a blank” his mother says during one of her moments of lucidity, but she is not alone. “We'll never know whose dream we describe,” Siegel writes after a walk under a “latticework” of tree limbs down into a ravine, and we, dreaming his words with him, don’t know either.
—THE
April 11, 2025
from “A Short History of Photography”
by Walter Benjamin
in Classic Essays on Photography
edited by Alan Trachtenberg
“...the viewer feels an irresistible compulsion to seek the tiny spark of accident, the here and now.”—Walter Benjamin
In his 1931 essay “A Short History of Photography” Walter Benjamin makes a case for the magical power of a photograph to push past art and deliver reality. This elusive but very real quality is inherent in the medium, he argues, and happens no matter how skillfully the photographer poses the subject or manipulates the picture. Unlike a painting, the photograph captures the “tiny spark of accident” and “the here and now” of a moment, and later in the essay he argues, “enters a space held together unconsciously” and so reveals an “optical unconscious” analogous to the hidden places of the mind probed by psychoanalysts.
To me the contrast between art and photography also suggests an interesting analogy to fiction and the personal essay, the sense of reality beyond the page in nonfiction that feeds the story and creates an added layer of intimacy between reader and writer. Something “not to be silenced, something demanding the name of the person.”
Of course, Benjamin was writing commentary on the photos, but in our feature we will flip the coin and let the photographs act as commentary on his paragraph.
Paragraph of the Week
In photography...one encounters something strange and new: in that fishwife from Newhaven who looks at the ground with such relaxed and seductive shame something remains that does not testify merely to the art of the photographer [David Octavius] Hill, something that is not to be silenced, something demanding the name of the person who had lived then, who even now is still real and will never entirely perish into art. And I ask: how did that former being surround this delicate hair, this glance, how did it kiss this mouth, around which desire curls insensibly, like smoke without a flame. Or one comes upon the picture of [Karl] Dauthendey—the photographer and father of the poet—from around the time of his wedding, seen with the wife whom one day shortly after the birth of their sixth child he found in the bedroom of his Moscow house with arteries slashed. She is seen beside him here, he holds her; her glance, however, goes past him, directed into an unhealthy distance. If one concentrated long enough on this picture one would recognize how sharply the opposites touch here. This most exact technique can give the presentation a magical value that a painted picture can never again possess for us. All the artistic preparations of the photographer and all the design in the positioning of his model to the contrary, the viewer feels an irresistible compulsion to seek the tiny spark of accident, the here and now.
—Walter Benjamin
April 25, 2025
from “Photography”
by Siegfried Kracauer
in Classic Essays on Photography
edited by Alan Trachtenberg
“In personal prose words feed on life beyond the page in a way that seems magical.”
—THE
I became interested in the connection between photography and the personal essay while working with Kathryn Winograd on her remarkable collection of essays and photographs entitled This Visible Speaking for The Humble Essayist Press which we featured last year. In her bibliography she listed a collection of Classic Essays on Photography edited by Alan Trachtenberg that caught my eye. When I read it, I found that many of the claims about the power of the photo to convey a reality beyond the art shed light on the subtle but very real intimacy found in personal prose: the sense that the words feed on life beyond the page in a way that seems magical.
Several weeks ago we featured a paragraph by Walter Benjamin about the “tiny spark of accident” and “the here and now” that animates a photo. This week we continue our discussion with a paragraph from “Photography” by Siegfried Kracauer on the sense of “endlessness” in a photograph.
The Paragraph of the Week
Photography tends to suggest endlessness. This follows from its emphasis on fortuitous complexes which represent fragments rather than wholes. A photograph, whether portrait or action picture, is in character only if it precludes the notion of completeness. Its frame marks a provisional limit; its content refers to other contents outside that frame; and its structure denotes something that cannot be encompassed—physical existence. Nineteenth-century writers called this something nature, or life; and they were convinced that photography would have to impress upon us its infinity. Leaves, which they counted among the favorite motifs of the camera, cannot be "staged" but occur in endless quantities. In this respect, there is an analogy between the photographic approach and scientific investigation: both probe into an inexhaustible universe whose entirety forever eludes them.
—Siegfried Kracauer
Commentary
A photo is a fragment drawing on “endlessness,” and in this way it is like personal nonfiction. The photograph has a frame that “precludes the notion of completeness.” The frame draws the line, but any detail within the frame “refers to contents outside the frame” suggesting that it is part what “cannot be encompassed.” In a personal essay this idea of the story drawing on an implied larger world is similarly palpable. People not in the essay about the crying baby hear the baby too, and the moon in an essay about night swimming shines on dry land as well. In a photograph details overlap like leaves suggesting an infinite depth that “cannot be ‘staged,’ but occur in endless qualities.” In a similar way the writer of personal prose does not create details to construct a complete and imagined whole but selects them from the larger whole suggesting an infinity left unsaid. In this way personal essayists assay their world like scientists probing “into an inexhaustible universe whose entirety forever eludes them.”
—THE
May 2, 2025
from Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
by Valeria Luiselli
“Why did you come to the United States?”
Valeria Luiselli is the author of books which use documentary techniques to create novels, but in Tell Me How It Ends she writes a long-form personal essay about her experiences as a translator for young asylum seekers working their way through the U.S. court system seeking legal representation. Her most memorable case was her first, an adolescent boy from Honduras threatened by gangs. His family decided he must leave when his best friend was shot and killed beside him while the two ran from Barrio 18 thugs. The boy was able to acquire a lawyer because he carried with him a battered police report over the long and torturous journey to America, physical evidence that his story was true. Luiselli's book is organized around the forty questions she was required to ask each asylum seeker including question #2: “Why did you come to the United States?”
Published during the second year of the first Trump administration, the book is as relevant now as ever. The Paragraph of the Week and the Commentary are back-to-back paragraphs from the book by Luiselli.
The Paragraph of the Week
I recall every nuance of the first story I heard and translated in court. Perhaps only because it was the story of a boy I encountered again, a few months later, and have ever since kept in close contact with. Or perhaps because it's a story condensed in a very specific, material detail that has continued to haunt me: a piece of paper that the boy pulled from his pocket toward the end of his interview, the creases and edges worn. He unfolded it gently, slowly, treated it with the same careful precision a surgeon might have when making a decisive incision. He laid it in front of me on the table. As I skimmed through it, still unsure about what he was showing me, he explained that the document was a copy of a police report he'd filed more than a year and a half ago. The report stated, in three or four typewritten sentences, all in capital letters and with some grammatical mistakes, that the subject in question raised a complaint against gang members who waited for him outside of his high school every day, frequently followed him home, and began threatening to kill him. It ended with the vague promise to "investigate" the situation. After showing it to me, he folded the document back up and put it in his pants pocket, rubbing his palm now and then against the denim, like he was activating a lucky charm.
—Valeria Luiselli
Commentary
When our first day of work in court was over, my niece and I took the A train back home. As our subway sped uptown, along dark tunnels, through stations, past ghostly strangers waiting on platforms, the image of that piece of paper came back to me, insistently, with the strange power of symbols. It was just a piece of paper, damp with sweat, eroded by friction, folded and tucked inside a boy's pocket. Originally, it had been a legal document, a complaint filed by a boy hoping to produce a change in his life. Now it was more of a historical document that disclosed the failure of the document's original purpose and also explained the boy's decision to leave that life. In a less obvious but equally material way, the document was also a road map of a migration, a testimony of the five thousand miles it traveled inside a boy's pocket, aboard trains, on foot, in trucks, across various national borders, all the way to an immigration court in a distant city, where it was finally unfolded, spread out on a mahogany table, and read out loud by a stranger who had to ask that boy: Why did you come to the United States?
—Valeria Luiselli
May 12, 2025
from Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going
by Ana Maria Spagna
“My favorite moments in essays by Ana Maria Spagna happen when she scrutinizes an idea by flipping it over in her prose.”—THE
To celebrate our ten years of publishing, The Humble Essayist has spent the year reprising past features. This week we dug into our archives and found this Paragraph of the Week from 2023 by Ana Marie Spagna.
Spagna is an elegant stylist and a master of the form of the personal essay. Every paragraph in Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going is impeccably shaped with no apparent fuss or bother making it all seem easy, and I do think I could have chosen almost any one of them to be the Paragraph of the Week. But I found as I read the book that I am drawn to paragraphs in which she takes on an idea and offers it to us as she discovers it.
She is the author of nine books including PUSHED: Miners, a Merchant, and (Maybe) a Massacre. Her work has been recognized by the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, the Society for Environmental Journalists, the Nautilus Book Awards, and as a four time finalist for the Washington State Book Award.
The Paragraph of the Week
Here's what I'm thinking: climate change is like cancer. It's a dire diagnosis, maybe not yet terminal, but something very close, and it demands a kind of toughness, a fighting attitude, a willingness to change almost everything about how we live. People like to talk about this, to write articles and books and circulate petitions about the deservedness of it all—and the urgency—but hardly anybody talks about the flip side, about how beneath the diagnosis lies something else. The cold hard grief, for what we've lost, for what we're losing, for what we're going to lose inevitably, no matter what, and maybe most of all, for how we used to be—carefree and ignorant of consequences, full of youthful invincibility, yes, but also full of easy passion. And hope. I can't help it; I miss the hope.
—Ana Maria Spagna
Commentary
My favorite moments in essays by Ana Maria Spagna happen when she scrutinizes an idea by flipping it over in her prose. That is the true restlessness in Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going. In one essay she wrestles with whether ambition is a matter of love or drive and settles, relieved, on love. In another she wonders if compassion is finite or unlimited and convinces herself and us that it compounds. In our Paragraph of the Week she takes on the flipside of the climate disaster we all know is here and getting worse and thinks about what we have lost in our “cold hard grief.” Among the casualties she lists blissful ignorance and “youthful invincibility,” and I find myself lingering on the phrase “easy passion” as our desires become implicated in our undoing. Her discovery—and it comes to her as a surprise—is that she misses hope which, it turns out was false but still felt like hope. Paragraphs such as these are the most intimate moments in this most intimate of genres, not because they reveal some personal secret but because they allow us, as readers, to participate in thoughts and emotions with the writer as she is discovering them. "Here's what I'm thinking," she writes, and we think it with her in an act of shared intimacy.
—THE
