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The ideal essay - the Platonic ideal of the essay - is empty almost: in fact Plato wouldn't have liked it as a form, it would have struck him as much too equivocal, irresponsible, shifty pseudo-philosophical. But then, so did drama & epic. Basically: the essay is a ‘think-piece’ that wears its learning (deceptively) lightly (lightness was one of the memos Calvino left for this millennium); that seems informal, a spontaneous performance, but is most likely the result of real work, not to mention a long love-affair with language, & wide reading. It's tempting to say that the essayist, the good essayist, is a man (or woman) of letters, but it doesn't help because that too is an elusive & possibly extinct character.
Essays take an overview without belabouring you with all the evidence. They’re sometimes aphoristic. They invest in the notion that if you succeed in saying whatever it is well, if you get the right words on your side, then there must be something in what you’re saying. Essays have affinities, with journalism & reviewing, but it's not the same thing. Only a few, a very few of your ‘pieces’ are essays, it turns out.
I think we are talking here, now, about the essay partly out of nostalgia; it's about to be extinct, or it's a threatened species, dying out of living memory like the last W[orld]-war. But also because, being a kind of fugitive genre or 'kind'; it beckons as a possible ‘home’ to many writers, from Grub Street to academe, from poets to cooks, who are eager to evade labels & definitions. This is probably connected with a feeling that the identities [of] novelist, poet, dramatist, biographer, travel writer, & so on don't work; that genre boundaries are breaking down, that it's all “writing”, textuality, or (even) performance on the page. The essay in this sense has a promise of the new?