Archive 2026
Click on the name: Emma Bolden, Rachel Cline, Lynda Rushing, L.C. Killingsworth, James Cooke, Eliot Weinberger, Lydia Millet, Jill Christman, James Baldwin, Jamie Etheridge, Olia Hercules, Thoreau (Richardson), E. B. White, Sarah Wells, Iris Murdoch, Ana Maria Spagna, Yiyun Li, John McPhee. Emilee Hackney, Edward Abbey.
January 9, 2026
from “Admit the Gravity”
in River Teeth Fall 2025
by Emma Bolden
“Even though voice cannot be taught, it can, sadly, be damaged, and even destroyed, especially in a young writer.”—THE
I had the honor of writing the “Editor’s Notes” to the fall 2025 edition of River Teeth journal, and for the month of January we will feature four essays from this issue.
I chose as my topic “voice” because the fall issue has such a wide variety of interesting voices. I agree with the poet William Stafford that voice is a gift that cannot be taught: “You already have a voice and don’t need to find one,” he once told a group of writers. But even if it cannot be taught, voice can be silenced, often through self-censorship. In “Admit the Gravity” Emma Bolden reclaims her voice by breaking a rule she learned in a writer’s workshop.
You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.
The Paragraph of the Week
I fell to my knees on the kitchen tile. It didn’t seem possible. Nothing seemed possible, in the face of this. Less than an hour later we were standing, me and my aunts and uncles and my father and grandfather and the priest, around the bed in which her body lay, dead, one hand curled and claw-like. The priest blessed her body’s mouth and hands and feet. Last rites. Her final sacrament, received after her death. Later I sat on the front porch while an aunt walked into the front yard, yelled “goddamn” as loudly as she could, and told me I looked beautiful. She kissed me on the cheek. There were so many Honey Baked hams. It was my first real experience of familial grief and what I learned was what a shock it was, how strange it was, an ending, even when you think you know what’s coming.
—Emma Bolden
Commentary
Even though voice cannot be taught, it can, sadly, be damaged, and even destroyed, especially in a young writer. Following the “not-entirely-unspoken rule” of never writing about “dead pets or dead grandmothers,” Emma Bolden was discouraged in workshops from writing about her grandmother. “Instead, I wrote poems that were poor copies of poets who themselves had died – cummings, Eliot, Dickinson, Sexton,” she explains. “It was how you learned, I was told: by listening to the voices that came before, not the voice that came from you.” The lesson sank in as a stultifying rebuke: “And anyway what did I have to say?” Fortunately, she realized over time that the only way to understand the events in her life is to “language them” in her own voice. In “Admit the Gravity” she finally finds her own words for the forbidden subject of her grandmother whose death “ghosts” her and keeps her up at night.
—THE
January 16, 2026
from “Best Pals”
by Rachel Cline
in River Teeth Fall 2025
“I learned several new pleasures...the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump.”
—Rachel Cline
Last fall, I had the honor of writing the “Editor’s Notes” of River Teeth magazine, and for the month of January we are featuring four essays from this issue. I chose as my topic “voice” because the fall issue has such a wide variety of interesting voices. Rachel Cline’s essay “Best Pals” shows how experiences in our youth shape our emerging voices.
You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.
The Paragraph of the Week
The following summer, Nancy taught me a game she called “Body Comfort.” After lights out, she sat down on my butt and explained the rules: we each had a bank of 100 requests. For example, you might ask for ten shoulder rubs and when those were done, five arm tickles, and then fifteen karate chops. When you got to 100, it was the other person’s turn. You could ask for anything you wanted. I learned several new pleasures from her requests: the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump. Trading off meant that one gave generously in order to receive bounteously in return, and the countdown added an undercurrent of suspense. It was a game of never-ending interest.
—Rachel Cline
Commentary
Reading no doubt influences our writerly voice, but the experience with language as we grow up largely shapes it because that is when we first see and feel the effect of words in action. We glimpse this process at work in “Best Pals” by Rachel Cline when she and her camping friends practice the art of being snarky after lights out by playing games such as “Body Comfort,” with silly names for ways to “pleasure each other” including “the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump.” Such verbal play—and the snickers and cringes it induces—is the real-life laboratory in which we learn how words work. Unfortunately, the hidden reality behind such wordplay is not always benign, and over the course of Cline’s essay we learn that a seemingly innocent game of naming bodily pleasures is the symptom of an unspeakable evil suffered by her “best pal” who became the victim of it.
—THE
January 23, 2026
from “Harvey”
by Lynda Rushing
in River Teeth Fall 2025
“The interior voices we rarely reveal in public burn like fire inside the internal combustion engine of the personal essay.”—THE
Here is a section from another essay in the Fall 2025 Issue of River Teeth magazine that we have been featuring this month. In it Lynda Rushing, a schoolgirl with a crush on a mysterious fellow student, learns that he has clearly been taken by another. The story is an old one, but her recreation of her youthful thoughts, chastened by her adult voice, is fresh and winning.
You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.
The Paragraph of the Week
But what I’m sure of is this. The air I was breathing became very heavy, like air saturated with seawater on a planet with too much gravity. And it was suddenly very still. A length of time equal to a thousand racing heartbeats went by. The music kept playing, not missing a beat, but it had lost its rich timbre, sounding tinny and far away. The table was still there, solid and glittering with candles, but I felt as though I had somehow risen several inches above my chair. I had become untethered from the earth, floating like a piece of dust, twirling in the candlelight.
—Lynda Rushing
Commentary
The interior voices we rarely reveal in public burn like fire inside the internal combustion engine of the personal essay. I hear the interior voice hidden subtly in the irony of Lynda Rushing writing about her childhood crush, her announcement of adolescent joy mildly rebuked in the retelling by the knowing tone, the hidden voice, of the writer as an adult: “It was finally going to happen—I would make myself talk to him and get to know him better. I would draw him out in my quiet way,” the teenager thinks coyly. “Maybe I could even dazzle him with my wit and surprise him with my profound understanding of life, years ahead of my chronological age.” “Quiet,” “dazzle,” “profound”—the author hears these words differently than does the girl she was, a girl clearly being set up for a fall. When she discovers the truth about her impossible love, the “air I was breathing became very heavy, like air saturated with seawater on a planet with too much gravity.”
—THE
January 30, 2026
from “Who Are We Missing”
by L.C. Killingsworth
in River Teeth Fall 2025
“...the precise opposite of loneliness.”—L. C. Killingsworth
Our final feature from the Fall 2025 issue of River Teeth magazine is from “Who Are We Missing” by L. C. Killingsworth. It carefully describes an overwhelming emotion which the author experienced at a funeral after a long stretch of feeling bereft.
You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.
The Paragraph of the Week
I can only describe the feeling as the precise opposite of loneliness. Though I suppose the evangelicals surrounding me would label it more simply: the presence of God. The feeling that we are all grabbing onto the same bare wire, letting a high-voltage current of humanity rip through us. There is a fullness, a charge to the feeling that cracks me open. It makes me forget that Harper is watching me cry—or, rather, replaces my embarrassment with a joy. Joy that we are crying together, about the same thing.
—L. C. Killingsworth
Commentary
The moment of recognition—that is what the personal essayist creates while looking within, generously sharing the hard-won discovery with us. Arriving at the funeral of a much-loved student from her past, L. C. Killingsworth hides the anger and sadness of her life behind a guarded persona. When asked what she has been up to by a former colleague before the service begins, she wonders what to say. “Most of my last decade has been spent expelling bodily fluids—vomit, milk, blood, my eternal soul—into a variety of receptacles, including human ones. Should I tell her about that?” Instead she says she has been doing nothing, “just, you know, working. Remotely.” When the service begins, though, emotion overwhelms her and she realizes in an epiphany that what she is feeling is what she has been missing. She recognizes it instantly, “the way a starving person knows the smell of food,” and suddenly understands why she has been furious and lost. As she and everyone else in the room focuses together on the young person who has died, “all feeling the shape of the same hole in the world,” she experiences “the precise opposite of loneliness,” an emotion that “cracks her open.” Any embarrassment about crying uncontrollably in public is replaced with joy. “Joy that we are crying together, about the same thing.” It is a privilege as a reader to listen in as a an essayist makes such an intimate, life-changing discovery.
—THE
February 6, 2026
from The Dawn of Mind
by James Cooke
“I sat bolt upright. Was that it? Was that the moment consciousness came into existence.”
—James Cooke
The Dawn of Mind is not a collection of personal essays, but a scientific and philosophical enquiry into the nature of life’s greatest wonder: consciousness. It is clear and well-written, challenging, yes, but completely accessible to the nonscientific mind, and James Cooke supports his most important insights with brief personal accounts of his discovery process in clarifying descriptions of how his theories formed that read like personal essays.
Dr. Cooke has three degrees in experimental psychology and neuroscience from Oxford University and has taught at Oxford, Berkeley, and the University College of London. The paragraph of the week describes thoughts he had lying on a narrow sofa in his houseboat moored along the canals of London’s Little Venice. For a decade he had been studying the brain as a neuroscientist in the hope of unravelling the “hard problem” of how consciousness could emerge from matter. Closing his eyes he imagined himself to be “the evolving universe, developing from its origins to us.”
Paragraph of the Week
I started with the bits with which we are all familiar: the big bang, planets forming, and the occurrence of the first life-forms on earth. My imagination struggled at first, trying to grasp what it would feel like to be the expanding lifeless cosmos. Then I got to the origin of life. I felt the web of matter that makes up the universe fold in on itself to create a little, enclosed bubble: the first single-celled organism. I felt how, in order to keep itself together, this organism needed to consistently interface with the world around it in a way that reached beyond its boundaries to anticipate what was going on outside itself to successfully navigate in the world. I sat bolt upright. Was that it? Was that the moment consciousness came into existence, when orderly living things attempted to separate from the disorderly world around them? Could the focus on the human brain have been a distraction created by our own hubris?
—James Cooke
Commentary
Before this moment of insight, James Cooke devoted his life to studying the brain as the seat of all conscious awareness. He was not alone. “The mainstream of consciousness science generally takes it as a given that the brain, or at least the nervous system, is responsible for bringing experience into existence.” After the epiphany on his houseboat, though, Cooke began to see that consciousness originated with the first living creatures as a way to “interface with the world” outside themselves and successfully navigate their environments. It came about long before any brain made the scene. Consciousness is a simulation of the outside world, a “living mirror,” that allows organisms to anticipate threats and create scenarios to avoid them. Unlike other matter that is subject to entropy, the law of thermodynamics that all things dissolve into disorder and randomness, living matter uses consciousness as a way to fight back and maintain its integrity for a lifetime. Born of the world, the light of awareness which is the seat of consciousness serves as a reminder that unlike, say, computers, we are embedded in experience: “that we are not truly separate from the world around us and that we are in fact deeply at home in existence.”
—THE
from “Where the Kaluli Live”
in An Elemental Thing
by Eliot Weinberger
“A Kaluli lives in two worlds,” writes Eliot Weinberger, the world of people and the world of birds.
The poet Forrest Gander calls An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger the “best book by our best living essayist.” Gander particularly admires the way Weinberger “heaps our plate with the facts of life as they are perceived by non-Western cultures, and he does so without patronizing qualifications—'they believe,’ etc.—so often used to distinguish non-scientific modes of experience and explanation.” In the paragraph of the week Weinberger describes a singing ceremony of the Kaluli, an indigenous group living in the rainforests around Mount Bosavi in Papua New Guinea.
Paragraph of the Week
Each village lived in a single longhouse, and the long-houses were hours apart. Once or twice a year, a village would invite another to come sing. As night fell, the visitors arrived in a double line, carrying torches, and climbed the stairs into the suddenly silent longhouse of their hosts. Stretching the entire length of the interior, the two rows, after long moments of expectation, hissed loudly ssssss, like a tire deflating, and abruptly sat down, revealing four singers, each identically and splendidly arrayed as birds, face and body painted red, eyes outlined in a black and white painted mask, Bird of Paradise feathers sprouting from armbands, head in an aureole of black Cassowary feathers with a single weighted and bobbing white feather in the middle, and a cascade of yellow palm leaf streamers arching from the waist up to the shoulders and down to the floor.
—Eliot Weinberger
Commentary
“A Kaluli lives in two worlds,” writes Eliot Weinberger, the world of people and the world birds. “The passage of life is from infant to bird.” Human songs are bird songs and “they describe a journey, each place-name bringing up nostalgic associations, for a tree is a home, a garden is food, a bird is a person, and life is a map and a song a path through it.” When separate villages met in a longhouse, designated singers were dressed in feathered gowns, “splendidly arrayed as birds.” Each singer sang until someone in the group moved to tears stabbed him with a burning torch. “Deep in the isolation of his song, the singer continued, unresponsive as he was burned again and again, until his song ended and another singer began, building the crescendos that would lead to his own burning.” Before the Kaluli ended these rites in 1984, the word for “tomorrow” and “yesterday” in their language were the same. Even though that is no longer true, “the same birds who were once Kaluli” singing
“ee-yehhhh-u
ee-yehhh-u
susulubee susulubee susulubee
are still in the trees.”
—THE
February 20, 2026
from We Loved It All: A Memory of Life
by Lydia Millet
“To me it doesn’t seem like a stretch for us to see our parenting...as a duty of care that reaches beyond the present.”—Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet writes books of fiction and her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, but her most recent book, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life, is nonfiction. It collects three long-form personal essays into what Caitlin Gibson calls “a profoundly evocative ode to life itself.”
We Loved It All is one of those beautiful, all-encompassing essay collections we admire at The Humble Essayist. Each essay wanders over a wide-range but the writing—intelligent, witty, and honest—pulls us forward, and in the end the many threads bear fruit in a theme about loving all life in a world threatened by mass extinction, loving bigger, loving better.
Passage of the Week
All that we really have to know is the need of all the young—the young beasts and the seedlings, along with the young we get to call our own.
It's the young, these days, who ask us for mercy and wait for us to answer. Ask that we act in their names instead of our own. Ask that we tell ourselves a better story than the one about winning and losing, about conquering and subsuming. A story that embraces the past along with the future, the powerless and speechless along with the loud and the blustering.
Even a story, say, that invites us not to want to be better than. But to want to be good.
Commentary
Lydia Millet’s cunningly designed collection begins with her family—our families—and the frustrating but ultimately fulfilling task of parenting. It expands over the course of three long essays to include loving the entire family of living things, even the hideously- faced anglerfish, to save life on the planet. To love bigger. To love better. She fears that such loving is not in our natures—mass extinction “is the ghost of the future”—and We Loved It All can be read as an elegy to all we love, but she doesn’t give up hope for “a better story.” She puts it this way: “To me it doesn’t seem like a stretch for us to see our parenting...as a duty of care that reaches beyond the present.” Let’s make a deal, she proposes. “What if we said our parenthood is not the lonely consecration of our own, of what emerged from us, but also of the many they depend on? What if we turned, in a dawning instant, and saw ourselves for what we are—the parents of the world to come?”
--THE
March 6, 2026
from The Heart Folds Early
by Jill Christman
“The pain was a fire, then a knife, a slaying, finally I will be killed, and then many knives. How could I not yet be dead?”
—Jill Christman
Jill Christman, a writer featured often at The Humble Essayist, has a new memoir called The Heart Folds Early. It is a story of abuse and loss, but also love and birth. Many have praised Christman’s new book for her ability to find humor amid agony—which is her gift—but I was moved by her message of healing from pain in order "to love more deeply" which is her superpower.
The Paragraph of the Week
Science still cannot point to one thing that brings it on, but from the inside, labor is fantastically elemental, a pull of the moon on the body's tides, pushing and receding. Labor crashed me and my boy against the packed sand and then lifted us up again, cradling our nested bodies in the soft, rocking waters. And there was pain, the deepest pain I have ever known—a fiery pain burning in what felt to me like the perfect center of my body, boiling lava pooling behind my pubic bone and flowing out through my limbs, down my arms and into my wrists and ankles, curling my fingers and stiffening my toes. The pain was a fire, then a knife, a slaying, finally I will be killed, and then many knives. How could I not yet be dead? Shouldn't I die now? And then, for two minutes, or near the end of a transition that lasted nearly five hours, just a few seconds, a respite: The pain stops, disappears. A stillness, complete. What other pain is like that?
—Jill Christman
Commentary
Jill Christman has endured much pain. She was sexually abused for years by an older, teenage pervert as a child, lost a fiancé, Colin, to a fireball in a car accident, barely survived bulimia, lost a son through miscarriage, and made the agonizing decision to abort a fetus with half a heart, a rare condition called hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Now in labor again for the last time, she reenacts these pains: the “boiling lava pooling” within and flowing through her body, the stabbing pain like a knife and then many knives. Her “wails echoed off the walls” though she was “lucid enough” to say that the other women in delivery “are going to be glad when I have this baby and shut the fuck up.” So, yes, much pain, but she is “determined to hang onto what joy remains in the world” in order to heal and “love more deeply," and she has had much light in her life as well. Colin showed her how to love again despite so much sexual abuse. After his death she fell in love with her husband, the poet Mark Neely, who taught her how to laugh again and based on this memoir loves her dearly and is the most sensible person in her life. She gave birth to her “impossibly beautiful” daughter, Ella, and is about to have a son, Henry. Above all for us, she survived to create paragraphs like this one—works of art—that embody our pain and transcend it.
—THE
March 13, 2026
from “Stranger in the Village”
in Notes of a Native Son
by James Baldwin
“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”—James Baldwin
Probably the most influential essayist of the twentieth century, James Baldwin moved to France to escape the racism of his home country, but the “American Negro problem” as he called it was never far from his thoughts as a trip to a small Swiss town revealed.
The Paragraph of the Week
The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
—James Baldwin
Commentary
When Baldwin arrived at a tiny Swiss village where no one had ever seen a black man, he was “a sight.” Children ran up to him shouting “Neger! Neger!” with the “charm of genuine wonder” and “certainly no element of intentional unkindness” unaware of the “echoes” that word would have for him. What the people of this village had no way of knowing was the history of racism in America where the “burning question” of rights for black men and women “became one of those used to divide the nation.” The struggle changed both sides so that a return to the innocence of that Swiss town is impossible. In the process Blacks became “as American as the Americans who despise him,” but slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement not only “created a new black man,” it “created a new white man, too.” For Baldwin the “Negro problem” was both shameful and an achievement. It has taught us, despite the fantasies of racists in America today, that “the world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”
—THE
March 20, 2026
from “Twelve Red Grapes”
in Short Reads
by Jamie Etheridge
“He should be here with us, I think, and touch the empty spot on the floor beside me.”
—Jamie Etheridge
This week we return to the writing of Jamie Etheridge whom we featured in July 2023. This piece, which appeared in Short Reads on December 31, 2025 describes the lengths that Etheridge and her daughters go to have good luck in the new year—and why they desperately believe they need it.
You can read the entire essay here.
The Paragraph of the Week
We squat under the dining table, blanket spread beneath us. The dogs whine, anxious at this odd late-night picnic. Three glass bowls sit at our feet, with twelve red grapes, glistening wet and ripe, in each. At the stroke of midnight, my daughters and I are to devour them—a New Year’s Eve tradition circulating on TikTok, the official fount of knowledge and wisdom for teen girls. Twelve grapes for twelve months, twelve wishes for good luck in the new year. There are other rituals, too. Dollar bills stuffed in our pockets. My younger daughter wears a polka-dot shirt with a polka-dot tie around her neck. Her sister rolls her eyes but tucks pennies into her socks. All our downstairs windows are open; the back door, too. There’s a pot of black-eyed peas on the stove, and on the counter a lemon studded with toothpicks, meant to look like a pig. We’re all wearing white undershirts and red panties. I’m not sure what specific luck these are meant to bring, but we all agree we need as much as we can get this year.
—Jamie Etheridge
Commentary
“The clock tocks down,” writes Jamie Etheridge. “Ten minutes to midnight.” She keeps bumping her head on the underside of the table they have crouched under for good luck. “Ow,” she says. “Focus, Mom,” her daughter tells her, but she hits her head again. Her younger daughter wishes that they “all stay healthy and live a long life.” The older, dutiful daughter who often tells her mother what she wants to hear, promises to “work out every day, stay away from the drama, and finish the year with A’s and B’s.” The reason they need as much luck as they can get is that the girls’ father died the year before. “Suddenly. Unexpectedly.” They are “still devastated.” So they try every superstitious trick they know to make the next year go right, including eating twelve grapes, one for each month, an idea that the girls picked up from TikToc. When Etheridge opens her cell phone to the picture of the girls’ father his “smile warms us,” Etheridge writes, “and I imagine him here, sipping from a flute of champagne, kissing the girls’ flushed cheeks, and stroking my lips with his fingers. He should be here with us, I think, and touch the empty spot on the floor beside me.” When midnight comes they gobble down their red grapes merrily and Etheridge bumps her head again. “The girls laugh and hug the dogs, letting them lick grape juice from their fingers.”
—THE
March 28, 2026
from Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine
by Olia Hercules
“I know that we are not victims. And we are not just survivors. We, Ukrainians of many ethnicities, cultures and histories, are united.” —Olia Hercules
In Strong Roots Olia Hercules and members of her family displaced from home create mosaics as therapy during the war with Russia. Broken chips of tesserae pressed into mortar represent unity amid diversity, and in the family’s “thirst for creativity” she finds hope that light will overcome the darkness of war. In the paragraph the author mentions the Askania gold-crested crane which migrates annually from Africa to Ukraine and has come to represent the desire of displaced Ukrainians to return to their home one day. In that unity she sees the resolve, despite the seemingly endless streams of bombs, to do more than survive, but to prevail.
The paragraph and the commentary this week are both by the author.
Speaking of mosaics, The Humble Essayist will take a three month sabbatical from this page to create a mosaic of his own on the retaining wall in his backyard to see if he can turn stones pressed in mortar into an essay one day. He plans to post progress on this project on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram so, if you like, you can follow along. He will be back, though, on July 3 for the twelfth birthday of this page with our annual tribute to Henry David Thoreau.
The Paragraph of the Week
The day after the big celebration, my cousin proposes we use the large table to teach the children how to make a mosaic. She has been practising this, as well as a myriad of other art therapy techniques, in Berlin, helping displaced Ukrainian adults and children to rebuild neurone connections and to heal themselves. We use special pliers to chip off small pieces of glass and ceramics, then stick them on a mosaic, gently, where it feels good to do so. The children are using pre-made patterns of birds and artichoke flowers and I am gluing my pieces freestyle, clumsily but enjoyably, on a tatty wooden tray. Of course I attempt to depict the Askania gold-crested crane, the same I painted on the frame of the photograph of me and my brother in that dusty field near our childhood home. Ira explains to us what is happening in our brain while we work.
—Olia Hercules
Commentary
I think: this is it. This is the Ukrainian-ness that is in my blood. This thirst for curiosity, this thirst for creativity, the capacity to allow your brain to find a space to exist in two unavoidable worlds. I voice this to my family and friends. I say: grief is grief, and it is human and universal. Most of us live in a state of war, whether actual or personal. Everyone loses their loved ones, there is rarely anyone who escapes this feeling. But we must find space and snippets of time where grief is allowed to bloom, then an equal amount of time when we allow ourselves to rest and recover. It is important to accept the existence of the dark, but it is our responsibility to hold on to the light...I know that we are not victims. And we are not just survivors. We, Ukrainians of many ethnicities, cultures and histories, are united. We are scrambling to piece the mosaics of our personal and common history together, to add our family stitches to Ukraine's embroidery, comparing notes and becoming stronger.
— Olia Hercules
July 3, 2026
from "Spring"
in Walden
by Henry David Thoreau
“The night hawk...was not lonely but made all the earth lonely beneath it.”
—Henry David Thoreau
We’re back, after a hiatus in which we built the mosaic you see above which will serve as our logo for the rest of the year. This week, on July 4, we celebrate twelve years of The Humble Essayist, the 250th birthday of the nation, and the 182nd anniversary of Thoreau’s experiment in deliberate living on Walden Pond.
As usual, we choose a paragraph by Thoreau to celebrate, this time from “Spring” in Walden, and turn once again to the book Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson for our commentary. The Paragraph of the Week illustrates Thoreau’s awe and humility in the presence of one of the glories of nature, and Richardson uses that to discuss the selflessness required for human beings to understand their place in the scheme of things.
[Note: Richardson’s paragraph has been lightly edited to fit our two-paragraph format.]
The Paragraph of the Week
On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a night-hawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the underside of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell.... It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe,—sporting there alone,—and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely but made all the earth lonely beneath it.
—Henry David Thoreau
Commentary
This way of seeing is one kind of negative capability, negative in the sense of negating the self. It is an imaginative projection or empathic identification with the "other"—in this case, other beings in nature. This way of seeing is one of the best things Thoreau has for us, and it will be a steady presence in his writing from the "Natural History of Massachusetts" right up through Walden. What makes this scene work is the long, detailed, and completely believable description of the hawk from the point of view of the man on the riverbank, followed by the single breathtaking sentence that leaps up to see the earth from the hawk's point of view. For a moment, man is not the lord of creation; the hawk is.
—Robert D. Richardson
July 10, 2026
from “Once More to the Lake”
by E. B. White
“Even though I know what’s coming, with each reading of this often sunny and tender essay I feel the shock anew.”—THE
After thirteen years of devoting the second week in July to a paragraph from E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” we have come to the last paragraph! The impeccably written essay about the author returning to the family lake house with his son was first published in Harper's magazine in 1941. You can find all of the other paragraphs from “Once More to the Lake” with our commentaries by going to our archives tab above, and you can read the entire essay online here.
The Paragraph of the Week
When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower, and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.
—E. B. White
Commentary
We should not be surprised by the last sentence of E. B. White’s most celebrated essay. He prefigures the gloom in almost every paragraph. He returns to the lake to “revisit old haunts,” he writes in paragraph one, and in succeeding paragraphs the lake is described as still like a “cathedral”, “remote and primeval,” and “creepy.” In the penultimate paragraph gods watching the “deathless joke” of mere mortals swimming in the rain “are grinning and licking their chops in the hills.” But even though I know what’s coming, with each reading of this often sunny and tender essay I feel the shock of the last word anew. Always in the background of our lives, memento mori do not surprise, but the “chill of death” does.
—THE
July 17, 2026
from To Say One Million Times, WOW!
by Sarah Wells
“Our monument to our greatness was someone else’s sanctuary, desecrated.”
—Sarah Wells
One of the themes of Sarah Wells’ new memoir—To Say One Million Times, WOW!—is that the “story of human experience is always more complex” than the versions we tell ourselves. In her winning and often funny voices, she attempts to enlarge her understanding, and ours as well, in matters of family, faith, and country.
On a trip through the western states she finds that the “nostalgic, heroic story of taming the wild west comes at the expense of too many other competing narratives.” She writes: “There’s a story we’ve been telling ourselves for a long time about America that isn’t the whole story but just one chapter from one character’s point of view. Maybe if we quiet down for a minute to listen, we’ll learn more of the story.”
Quiet down. Listen. That is the task of these essays.
In our paragraph of the week she listens hard to the other story of Mount Rushmore which is much in the news these days. She points out—in “The Paragraph of the Week” and in her “Commentary”—that the national monument admired by so many is also a profanation.—THE
The Paragraph of the Week
I used to feel differently about Mount Rushmore. Twenty-two years ago, I read The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone and marveled at the description of a sculptor in contrast to a painter. “If a painter blundered, what did he do? He patched and repaired and covered over with another layer of paint. The sculptor on the contrary had to see within the marble the form that it held. He could not glue back broken parts.” In the Black Hills, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore found four faces in the rock of ages and carved the image of men out of it. He saw within the stone the form that it held. How glorious! How godlike! What a wonder!
—Sarah Wells
Commentary
But since then, I’ve learned more about Mount Rushmore’s story. The mountain face of faces was sacred to the Lakota Sioux, who called the granite formation Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, or Six Grandfathers Mountain. The Lakota medicine man Nicolas Black Elk gave the mountain its name after a vision of the six sacred directions—west, east, north, south, above, and below. For the Lakota, the mountain stood for kindness, love, longevity, and wisdom. It was a place of prayer and devotion. They lived harmoniously with that marvelous slab of granite towering over the surrounding hills for centuries, until us Europeans came along with our chisels and firearms and trails of tears. Six Grandfathers became four Founding Fathers. Our monument to our greatness was someone else’s sanctuary, desecrated.
—Sarah Wells
July 24, 2026
from The Sovereignty of Good
by Iris Murdoch
“Iris Murdoch coined the term ‘unselfing’ for losing oneself in art or nature.”
Iris Murdoch was an Irish-born British novelist and philosopher. Her book The Sovereignty of Good, writes the philosopher Mary Midgley, “is one of the very few books on philosophy which people outside of academic philosophy find really helpful.”
Murdoch was known for her witty aphorisms. She once observed that “philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious.” In this paragraph on the unselfing power of beauty, the obvious becomes very helpful indeed.
The Paragraph of the Week
I shall start by speaking of what is perhaps the most obvious thing in our surroundings which is an occasion for ‘unselfing’, and that is what is popularly called beauty...I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care. [Art also] invigorates our best faculties and, to use Platonic language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul. It is able to do this partly by virtue of something which it shares with nature: a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness.
—Iris Murdoch
Commentary
I play best on the guitar when I stop thinking. My right hand picks, my left runs up and down the fretboard, and fingers find the notes without any conscious control. Who knows where my mind goes, but it has wandered off, and I become the music. The philosopher Iris Murdoch coined the term “unselfing” for losing oneself in art or nature this way. “In that moment everything is altered,” she writes in The Sovereignty of Good. “The anxious self with its hurt vanity has disappeared.” Wonder allows her momentarily to shed the ego, see a world beyond herself with a feeling akin to love, and clear her mind of “selfish care.” Beauty in all its manifestations is “a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dreamlife of the consciousness.” I also experience unselfing when I write which I know sounds odd because writing seems like a self-absorbed process, but at the keyboard I almost always reach a point where the illusory self flickers and disappears and the words arrive from somewhere far away. Staring at sentences my mind goes into a zone in which nothing matters but the shifting of words as if they are things appearing before my eyes. Hours evaporate. At times words come in a rush and at other times in a trickle, and too often they stop coming altogether, and, hung up, I linger in forever, fingers above the keyboard hovering at the luminous edge of discovery, but at all stages the full cup of coffee beside me goes cold, and I am unselfed.
—THE
July 31, 2026
from “Sussex”
in Riverteeth: Spring 2026
by Ana Maria Spagna
“...that slow building is the essence of the whole that surpasses any of its parts”
Ana Maria Spagna is an essayist who lives in the North Cascades. Her essay “Sussex,” which originally appeared in the spring edition of Riverteeth, is from her newest collection Coiled: Essays on Urgency and Kinship due to be published this fall. In our commentary we discuss her masterful weaving of thematic threads to create a subtle and moving whole.
You can can read her essay in Riverteeth here and preorder her book here.
The Paragraph of the Week
Once, I had a close friend, a coworker, who had to shoot his own dog. He loved the dog, and the dog was very sick, and the vet was very far away. He did what he had to do, and he did it bravely. He dug the grave himself, by hand, near the tack shed beside the horse pasture, a place with a view of light-shifting on the mountains and plenty of mosquitoes, and he buried her there. In the weeks afterward, my friend loitered near the grave. He found excuses to work right there, day after day, and though none of that work mattered, he couldn't bring himself to leave.
—Ana Maria Spagna
Commentary
Sometimes it is hard to pick out a single paragraph in a masterfully written essay because the mastery is in the weaving of the whole, not in any single part. In “Sussex,” the surprising death of Ana Maria Spagna’s brother, Joe, dawns on the reader slowly but inexorably as it did in real life. She begins incongruously it seems with a neighbor who buried a dog but cannot leave the site. Then we are off to the Sussex in New Jersey, a dumpy motel with happy memories of the author and her wife visiting Joe’s family, making a joke about late night revelers they named “the Sussex girls back from the bingo hall.” The second visit she still feels nostalgic for the old Sussex, “just right in its small-scale discomforts,” but while sitting in plastic chairs overlooking the parking lot and swatting mosquitos that are everywhere in this essay, she hears stories about patrons overdosing there. Later we learn that her mother feels imprisoned in a nursing home and her sister is “just out of actual prison,” and Spagna recalls reading a book “about the wrong person dying” and drops another hint: “that’s this story too.” Soon her brother enters a hospital and dies of MRSA a few weeks later. It all seems to sneak up on us as it did on Joe and on her, and that slow building is the essence of the whole that surpasses any of its parts. Going back through the essay a second time, we see what we missed: bears tearing up garbage, her brother celebrating living longer than his dad, Covid and masks worn around necks, the pathetic motel sign pointing the wrong way. And the man with the dead dog?—he dies too. We realize that nothing, in fact, sneaks up on us in this essay. Always there, it waits to take hold.
—THE
August 7, 2026
from Things in Nature Merely Grow
by Yiyun Li
“Her garden is not metaphor, metonymy, or symbol.”
After the suicide of her second son, James, which echoed in several ways the suicide of her first son, Yiyun Li wrote the memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow. To honor James’ life as an autistic young man with savant abilities and out of respect for his choices, she thought her way through the book with Euclid as her guide, expressing as little emotion as possible, and Hanon, the piano finger exercises, for solace. As our Paragraph of the Week illustrates, the most powerful emotions are those that defy expression.
The Paragraph of the Week
Playing the Hanon exercises is a way of marking time, and so are all my other activities: working through Euclid's geometry books; going to piano lessons; taking a midday walk with my husband (in cold February rain, in a fragrant April breeze, in an unrelenting June heat); reading, writing, baking soda bread or yogurt coffee cake; pruning and feeding the roses, planting new seedlings, going outside to yell at the newborn bunnies that are feasting on my garden and then giving up when the bunnies cannot be stopped; weeding, weeding, weeding and then one day giving up because weeds are part of nature, too, and things in nature merely grow.
—Yiyun Li
Commentary
In the Hanon exercises, the beginning piano student repeats a pattern of notes with both hands going up and down the keyboard as a way to improve finger strength, dexterity, and control. They are, as in all music and in all that lives and grows, a way of “marking time.” Mechanical and repetitious, their beauty is their movement with subtle variations in pitch through time. This metronomic beat, Yiyun Li writes, is the way of the natural world. Her garden is not metaphor, metonymy, or symbol; it does not express an emotion or stand for an idea because it is part of nature and “things in nature merely grow,” unlike the dead who, and here lies the unspoken heartbreak, “are not going anywhere, do not need to mark time,” and “don’t necessarily help us mark time either.” This gap defines the inexpressible abyss that Yiyun Li cannot cross, but her book invites us to enter. “Words may fall short,” she writes, “but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.”
—THE
August 14, 2026
from Basin and Range
by John McPhee
“You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.”
In Basin and Range John McPhee comes up with memorable metaphors for “deep time”, a phrase he coined, and the best-known is our paragraph of the week which he came upon after gazing at a cut in a hillside that revealed many layers of geologic time. His extended metaphor gives us a measure of the time that the planet earth has evolved compared to the brief blip when humans, endowed with a rich consciousness, arrived on the scene.
In the commentary, he goes a step further and asks the question that geologists puzzle over. Is it possible for humans to go beyond merely measuring these eons of time to a felt experience of them. Can they achieve “a kind of companionship with the earth?”
The Paragraph of the Week
If you were to lift your arms and spread them wide and hold them straight out to either side and think of the distance from fingertips to fingertips as representing the earth's entire history, then you would have all the principal events in that hillside in the middle of the palm of one hand... [L]ook at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian [era] begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history. Geologists live with the geologic scale. Individually, they may or may not be alarmed by the rate of exploitation of the things they discover, but, like the environmentalists, they use these repetitive analogies to place the human record in perspective—to see the Age of Reflection, the last few thousand years, as a small bright sparkle at the end of time.
—John McPhee
Commentary of Various Geologists
“The human mind may not have evolved enough to comprehend deep time,” John McPhee writes. “It may only be able to measure it. At least that is what geologists wonder some times.” Then, without giving their names, McPhee quotes some of them in a passage that reads like the voice of the compound ghost of geology:
“A sense of geologic time is the most important thing to suggest to the nongeologist: the slow rate of geologic processes, centimetres per year, with huge effects, if continued for enough years.”
“A million years is a short time—the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.”
“It didn't take very long for those mountains to come up, to be deroofed, and to be thrust eastward. Then the motion stopped. That happened in maybe ten million years, and to a geologist that's really fast.”
“If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”
—John McPhee et al.
August 21, 2026
from All That’s Unseen
by Emilee Hackney
“Loyalty makes for committed, unbreakable bonds,” Emilee Hackney writes, but it “can also foster fear and discourage change.”
In her memoir All That’s Unseen about leaving her close knit, but in many ways stifling, community in the Appalachian mountains to attend Harvard, Emilee Hackney’s opinions about her experiences swing widely. She loves the mountains and coal country but despairs at the limitations it imposed on her life. Harvard provides an escape but nearly overwhelms her.
In the Paragraph of the Week and our commentary we watch her frame the running argument about staying in Appalachia or leaving that she has with herself throughout the book.
The Paragraph of the Week
In my Appalachia, loyalty is synonymous with respect. You are raised to revere the mountains and their people. Your people. The sense of community is so strong because the world beyond, you hear, is strange and cold and unforgiving, and you know this must be true because that's where the politicians are, the coal barons, the rich and powerful who look down on Appalachia and care about it only as far as they can take advantage of it.
–Emilee Hackney
Commentary
After this passage from her memoir, All That’s Unseen, Emilee Hackney goes on to write that leaving this close-knit community feels like a betrayal. “Like saying you're not good enough for me to the people and places that raised you,” but she knows she must leave because these ties also bind. “Loyalty makes for committed, unbreakable bonds,” she explains, but it “can also foster fear and discourage change.” She suffers humiliation and alienation at her Ivy League school, but encounters new ideas that open doors allowing her to grow—to grow, but not grow away. She is proud to be from coal country, and knows that she will always return to a “place undefinable, so worn and wild, that had been stripped and scavenged and shaken and robbed, yet never conceded to the forces that tried to hold it down.”
August 28, 2026
from “Cliffrose and Bayonets”
in Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
by Edward Abbey
“Edward Abbey inhabits his style in the same way that he inhabits the wild by shedding restraint and refinement to become someone greater that the product of civilized society.”—THE
Flipping through The Humble Essayist archives I came across an October 16, 2015 feature on Edward Abbey that spoke to me in a new way. We live in an age that swings between careless, obscene, and often hateful speech juxtaposed with speech that is careful, guarded, and safe. Woke, if you will. I’m rather firmly in the second group weighing my words carefully to be true without giving offense, an ethic that sometimes hangs over my writing too heavily, I fear. Abbey offers a possible path for writers like me born from his experience of living in the American West.
In All the Wild That Remains, David Gessner considers Edward Abbey to be “a man who, for all his flaws, showed through his example what it meant to live a counterlife, a life where the love of wildness really mattered and where one’s priorities grew out of that love.” Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang became a guide to environmental activism and his lyrical writing in Desert Solitaire offered up an elegiac cry for the lost wilderness of the West. For him, the good life lived in the wild offered the opportunity for spontaneity, and in this passage from Desert Solitaire Abbey describes the time that he threw a rock at a rabbit on impulse with surprising results. He is also surprised by—and learns from—his own response. It is the kind of honesty in writing that we need.
The Paragraph of the Week
For a moment I am shocked by my deed; I stare at the quiet rabbit, his glazed eyes, his blood drying in the dust. Something vital is lacking. But shock is succeeded by a mild elation. Leaving my victim to the vultures and maggots, who will appreciate him more than I could—the flesh is probably infected with tularemia—I continue my walk with a new, augmented cheerfulness which is hard to understand but unmistakable. What the rabbit has lost in energy and spirit seems added, by processes too subtle to fathom, to my own soul. I try but cannot feel any sense of guilt. I examine my soul: white as snow. Check my hands: not a trace of blood. No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. I have entered into this one. We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!
—Edward Abbey
Commentary
I was reminded of this paragraph by David Gessner who uses it in All the Wild That Remains to extoll the beauty of Edward Abbey’s writing style. When I turned to the paragraph in my own battered copy of Desert Solitaire describing a rabbit that Abbey impulsively killed by throwing a stone, I rediscovered the qualities that Gessner admires. Abbey is “alive on the page” in a way that is rare among essayists. Often shy in person, he knew how to “let loose” in his writing “where it counted.” He reports his actions with care and registers his own responses honestly, even when they surprise or implicate him. There is the excitement of discovery in Abbey’s prose that “dramatizes thought” and turns it “into a kind of action,” the words coming at us with the urgency of “someone talking to us.” But the passage—like most of Abbey’s writing—is noteworthy for one other quality that I would add to Gessner's list of literary virtues. Call it a predatory prose style. Edward Abbey inhabits his book in the same way that he inhabits the wild by shedding restraint and refinement to become someone greater that the product of civilized society. To rend the veil that separates him from the wild, he follows his impulses both as a writer and a human being, rewilding himself on the page to claim a place on earth among “the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, [and] the foul worms that feed on our entrails.” In this way the style becomes the man, an embodiment of his maverick soul.
—THE
