My favourite essays

what is the literary tradition out of which I’m working? The form that releases my best intelligence… The motor of the novel is story; the motor of the essay is thought… The world exists. Why re-create? I want to think about it, try to understand it. What I am is a wisdom junkie, knowing all along that wisdom is, in many ways, junk. I want a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation… I don’t seek to narrate time but to investigate existence. Time must die.

even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.

I like books. But overall I have probably learned more from essays: magazines, blogposts, newspapers, zines, pamphlets, megathreads, shitposts, dialogues, conceptual analyses, cost-benefit analyses, certain prose poems. I have probably read 35,000 of them, for instance; ten times more than books. (Between 2012 and 2013 I worked in a quiet bookshop and read all of the great aggregators of the day — Arts and Letters Daily, 3QuarksDaily, Longform.org, Kottke, Hacker News — in entirety. Easily 100,000 words a day. Eventually, desperate, I lowered my suspicion of neoliberals enough to read the culture posts on MR too - I studiously ignored the economics ones.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t keep track of them. I’ve done my best to reconstruct this part of my inner life here:

I only got 1% so far. I wish I could assure you it’s the top 1% but it isn’t.

The shortlist consists of some that changed my life in a large and obvious and lasting way. It’s probably still only 5% of those.

See also

• it’s all blogs