by Hilton Als
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
MARILYN ABILDSKOV: The Trick: Notes Toward a Theory of Plot
NOAM CHOMSKY: Prospects for Survival
PAUL CRENSHAW: Cadence
EDWIDGE DANTICAT: All the Home You’ve Got
STEVEN HARVEY: The Other Steve Harvey
LESLIE JAMISON: The March on Everywhere
BETH UZNIS JOHNSON: Your Friend/My Friend, Ted
HEIDI JULAVITS: The Art at the End of the World
JENNIFER KABAT: Rain Like Cotton
SUKI KIM: Land of Darkness
DAVID WONG LOUIE: Eat, Memory
AMIT MAJMUDAR: Five Famous Asian War Photographs
RICK MOODY: Notes on Lazarus
TIMOTHY O’KEEFE: You Are the Phenomenology
PHILIPPE PETIT: In Search of Fear
THOMAS POWERS: The Big Thing on His Mind
DAVID SALLE: Clothes That Don’t Need You
LUC SANTE: Maybe the People Would Be the Times
KATHRYN SCHULZ: Losing Streak
JOHN SEABROOK: My Father’s Cellar
ADAM SHATZ: No Direction Home: The Journey of Frantz Fanon
SHERRY SIMPSON: Lucky You
CLIFFORD THOMPSON: The Moon, the World, the Dream
BARON WORMSER: Hannah Arendt in New York
Contributors’ Notes
Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2017
Notable Special Issues of 2017
Read More from the Best American Series
About the Editors
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2018 by Hilton Als
All rights reserved
The Best American Series® and The Best American Essays® are registered trademarks of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
ISSN 0888-3742 (print)
ISSN 2573-3885 (e-book)
ISBN 978-0-544-81734-0 (print)
ISBN 978-0-544-81743-2 (e-book)
Cover design by Christopher Moisan © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Als photograph © Ali Smith/Redux
v1.0818
“The Trick: Notes Toward a Theory of Plot” by Marilyn Abildskov. First published in The Gettysburg Review, Autumn 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Marilyn Abildskov. Reprinted by permission of The Gettysburg Review.
“Prospects for Survival” by Noam Chomsky. First published in The Massachusetts Review, Winter 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Noam Chomsky. Reprinted by permission of Noam Chomsky.
“Cadence” by Paul Crenshaw. First published in Hotel Amerika, Winter 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Paul Crenshaw. Reprinted by permission of Hotel Amerika.
“All the Home You’ve Got” by Edwidge Danticat. First published in Freeman’s, April 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Edwidge Danticat. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Other Steve Harvey” by Steven Harvey. First published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Steven Harvey. Reprinted by permission of Steven Harvey.
“The March on Everywhere” by Leslie Jamison. First published in Harper’s Magazine, April 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Leslie Jamison. Reprinted by permission of Leslie Jamison.
“Your Friend/My Friend, Ted” by Beth Uznis Johnson. First published in Southwest Review, 102/1, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Beth Uznis Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Beth Uznis Johnson.
“The Art at the End of the World” by Heidi Julavits. First published in The New York Times Magazine, July 9, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Heidi Julavits. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.
“Rain Like Cotton” by Jennifer Kabat, copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Kabat. This essay, “Rain Like Cotton” by Jennifer Kabat, was commissioned by and first published in BOMB Magazine 141, Fall 2017. © Bomb Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors. The BOMB Digital Archive can be viewed at www.bombmagazine.org. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. All rights reserved.
“Land of Darkness” by Suki Kim. First published in Lapham’s Quarterly, Summer 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Suki Kim. Reprinted by permission of Suki Kim.
“Eat, Memory” by David Wong Louie. First published in Harper’s Magazine, August 2017. Copyright © 2017 by David Wong Louie. Reprinted by permission of David Wong Louie.
“Five Famous Asian War Photographs” by Amit Majmudar. First published in Chicago Quarterly Review, #24, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Amit Majmudar. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Notes on Lazarus” by Rick Moody. First published in Conjunctions, #69, Fall 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Rick Moody. Reprinted by permission of Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC.
“You Are the Phenomenology” by Timothy O’Keefe. First published in The Massachusetts Review, Winter 2017. Reprinted with permission from pp. 27–37 of You Are the Phenomenology. Copyright © 2018 by the University of Massachusetts Press.
“In Search of Fear” by Philippe Petit. First published in Lapham’s Quarterly, Summer 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Philippe Petit. Reprinted by permission of Philippe Petit.
“The Big Thing on His Mind” by Thomas Powers. First published in The New York Review of Books, April 20, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Powers. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Powers.
“Clothes That Don’t Need You” by David Salle. First published in The New York Review of Books, September 28, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by David Salle. Reprinted by permission of The New York Review of Books.
“Maybe the People Would Be the Times” by Luc Sante. First published in Vice, October/November 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Luc Sante. Reprinted by permission of Luc Sante.
“Losing Streak” by Kathryn Schulz. First published in The New Yorker, February 13/20, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Kathryn Schulz. Reprinted by permission of Kathryn Schulz.
“My Father’s Cellar” by John Seabrook. First published in The New Yorker, January 23, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by John Seabrook. Reprinted by permission of John Seabrook.
“No Direction Home: The Journey of Frantz Fanon” by Adam Shatz. First published in Raritan, Fall 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Adam Shatz. Reprinted by permission of Adam Shatz.
“Lucky You” by Sherry Simpson. First published in Harvard Review, #51. Copyright © 2017 by Sherry Simpson. Reprinted by permission of Sherry Simpson.
“The Moon, the World, the Dream” by Clifford Thompson. First published in The Threepenny Review, Spring 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Clifford Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Clifford Thompson.
“Hannah Arendt in New York” by Baron Wormser. First published in Solstice, Winter 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Baron Wormser. Reprinted by permission of Baron Wormser.
Foreword
The ro
om had three views: “At one sweep,” he wrote, “I command a view of my household . . . and see below me my garden, my farmland, my courtyard, and into most parts of my house.”1 The house, the Château de Montaigne, was built in the fourteenth century and purchased in 1477 by the essayist’s great-grandfather, Ramon Eyquem, a prosperous fish and wine merchant who laid the foundations of the family fortune. About thirty miles east of Bordeaux, the château has gone through many renovations, but the famous tower remains intact, a monument to the great writer who once resided there and its fortifications a reminder of the violent religious conflicts he endured. The château is where Montaigne will be born in 1533, grow up with Latin as his native tongue, be paternally indulged and spared a country life’s ordinary chores. And then in 1571 at the age of thirty-eight, shortly after his father’s death and the inheritance of both the estate and a large fortune, the château is where he will retire from public life, construct a private library, and devote himself to study and leisurely reflection. The new lord of the manor will eventually abandon the family patronymic and assume the name of his beloved estate: Montaigne. Was ever a room, a study, a house, a piece of property, a person so closely attached to a literary genre?
Situated on the third floor of one of the château’s stone towers, just above his bedroom, and two floors above his Catholic chapel, the library was his favorite place on earth. It had originally served as a wardrobe (une grande garderobe), which he considered the most useless room in the house and so converted it into a library when he established residence. A self-proclaimed klutz, inept at most practical endeavors, Montaigne surely had a talented carpenter construct the five semicircular shelves that housed his personal collection of some one thousand books. He also probably didn’t paint the inscriptions from Greek and Latin authors on the room’s ceiling beams, some of which can still be seen. But it’s very likely he alone designed the interior space (including the ten-by-eight-foot adjoining study with a fireplace for colder days) of his personal “kingdom” where he would spend so much time alone with his precious books and fluid thoughts. I’ve never visited the tower, and perhaps someday will, but in all of my reading and research I’ve also never come across any information from anyone about the dimensions of this historic library, even though it has been a prominent tourist site for centuries. My only information comes from Montaigne, who writes that the diameter of his library was seize pas—sixteen paces.
“Paces” is perhaps the most accurate word, since Montaigne preferred to compose in motion (“My mind will not budge unless my legs move it”), pacing back and forth, often dictating to someone who sat, one imagines quietly and patiently, at a small writing table facing the bookshelves. And this is how the modern essay takes its shape. A solitary, restless individual, perhaps one experiencing what we might call a “midlife crisis,” circling the floor of his library, now and then consulting one of his books, now and then peering out of one of his beloved windows to enjoy a momentary interruption of thought, and occasionally looking up at the ceiling for philosophical inspiration. And so, in a tentative fashion, he gradually figures out how to document his innermost thoughts and originate a suitable mode of vernacular expression. He had a later start than most. Although he had recently published a long translation of a theological work from Latin to please his father, he didn’t consider himself a writer or a scholar: he had no craft, no subjects, skills, or style. If, like some literary geniuses, he did have a sense of destiny, he presumably thought that his destiny would be achieved only if he avoided a destination. He didn’t retire with essays in mind. They slowly emerged out of the relentless reflective process, the endless pacing.
His was a mind filled with doubt. His genius evolved with his writing and it essentially consisted in making doubt a source of creativity, not an intellectual liability or a spiritual affliction. When he looked up at his ceiling beams he could absorb his favorite maxims from his cherished classic authors, and many of these came from one thinker cited frequently in the essays—the third-century physician and philosopher Sextus Empiricus. In his influential Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus, not himself an original thinker, conveniently handed down the essentials of the ancient schools of skepticism, mainly those based on the philosophy of Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360–c. 270 bce), whose brand of skepticism especially interested the early Montaigne. Put briefly, Pyrrho believed we could know nothing for certain and that every opinion could be countered by an equally convincing opposite opinion (for more on Pyrrho and Sextus I recommend the excellent entries easily found online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Temperamentally opposed to dogmatism and having witnessed the ways dogmatism fueled the religious persecutions of his time, Montaigne clearly found a skeptical attitude to be both illuminating and salutary.
But the skeptical philosophy promoted by the ancients was not intended to be an epistemology, an investigation into the limits of human knowledge. It had a practical goal, one that may appear quite peculiar today. The skepticism practiced by Pyrrho was an introduction to a set of skills that enabled his followers to produce opinions that would effectively counter or refute other opinions. This systematic process, however, was not devised for the sake of testing public arguments to arrive at the truth (there was no truth or it was irrelevant) but rather to attain by a “suspension of judgment” what the skeptics termed ataraxia, a mental state of tranquility and imperturbability.
How a deliberate clash of conflicting opinions could result in tranquility is not especially clarified by Sextus; the process appears to take a Zen Buddhist form of sudden enlightenment or, as Sextus admits, tranquility follows the suspension of judgment somehow “by chance.” Apparently, if we can convince ourselves that one opinion or one course of action is no better than another we needn’t worry about selecting the correct one. As we come to understand the futility of possessing a dogmatic belief in any philosophical, scientific, or religious opinion we can reach ataraxia, which is perhaps best translated literally, though clumsily, as “troublelessness.” This psychological goal was a large part of Montaigne’s attraction to ancient skepticism. Uncertainty could be as therapeutic as essaying while pacing. And consequently the essays, as he began to shape them, embraced two large converging vectors—the dynamics of skepticism and the quest for happiness. “What do I know?” and “How should I live?”
Some readers may wonder why, given his adherence to skepticism, Montaigne took comfort in his title, his possessions, his estate, his routines, and his Catholicism. But this, too, is derived from Pyrrho via Sextus. Since no single way of life could be proven to be superior to another, no one government to another, then one may as well relax and accept the customs, laws, traditions, morals, and standards of life that one’s community offers. This “traditionalist” approach based on the “suspension of judgment” would be abhorrent to many people today, even those who would not for a moment consider themselves dogmatic in their beliefs. But it was understandable to Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose well-known essay on Montaigne focused on skepticism. For Emerson, Montaigne represents the skeptical mind, and his essay largely contends with skepticism as a lived philosophy.
At one point, Emerson confronts the inherent conservatism that seems to be at the heart of the skeptical mind-set. “The superior mind” (i.e., the skeptic), he writes, “will find itself equally at odds with the evils of society, and with the projects that are offered to relieve them.” He then goes on to say something that the ancient skeptics, with their acceptance of social conventions, would disagree with: “The wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness of property, and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties wish everyone committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism.”
Montaigne provides a pretext for Emerson to test his own skepticism. It is not easy to see where Emerson stands, as he appears to advocate skepticism while at the same time disavowing it. No matter how necessary it may be for an o
pen-minded individual to suspend judgment, skepticism will be swallowed up by life’s larger forces. “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.” Emerson’s skepticism may be tough-minded and unsympathetic, but it is always optimistic.
The skeptic is always faced with an internal contradiction: to say that knowledge consists of knowing that nothing can be known for certain is to express a certainty. This puts it simply, yet the core inconsistency (which didn’t perturb Sextus) caused Bertrand Russell and, before him, the essayist and founder of British Empiricism, Francis Bacon, to dismiss much of skeptical thought. But there is another problem with skepticism, especially with extreme forms: to follow a rigorous Pyrrhonic suspension of judgment would seem to make everyday life impossible. The Pyrrhonists, like Sextus, knew this and it’s why they didn’t feel they had to doubt certain beliefs, and thereby accepted the laws, customs, and moral codes of their community. But to read Sextus is to see that his radical system of skepticism is not without its internal contradictions. And there’s also the dubious claim that the strength of any opinion can be nullified by an equally persuasive counteropinion.
One of life’s troubles, of course, is in determining which opinions are open to the vigorous give-and-take of discussion and which are so settled that discussion becomes an unproductive waste of energy. And which are so taboo they cannot even be mentioned. These are not easy distinctions; what seems eminently debatable for one person is off-limits to another; what is obvious or self-evident to you is perhaps mysterious and complicated to me. Although Montaigne could enjoy being a contrarian, he is—as I read him—a reasonable skeptic who proceeded in discussion and debate with an open, receptive, and tolerant attitude (“No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me”). As he gained experience in essaying, his reliance on Sextus diminished and his love for Plutarch grew. Montaigne realized that one needed to be skeptical of skepticism; it could serve as a useful intellectual tool, especially if we grew overly confident of human reason, but skepticism, too, will often fall short of supplying us with the answers we need.
