Buried in Contemplation

The first sentence of an essay is a doorman who invites the reader into the world that will unfold within what succeeds it. It is what sets the tone for the piece. The reader expects something quite different to follow from the pale butler with a posh, monotone accent than the dashing server who greets with a smooth voice and a smile. It would be quite obscene to follow the latter and not the former with a dingy mansion and rows of coffins. And yet…

The first sentence of an essay begins and therefore embodies a dialogue. Great writers therefore are not merely great theorists. They don’t merely have the best arguments. They don’t merely speak truly. They understand that all of these activities are intelligible only in dialogue, in discourse, in relation to what the reader brings to an essay. And so to understand how to write a great essay, one must understand how a great essay is read.

This dialogical element is essential. For an essay is an attempt, an attempt to not only establish some thesis, but convince its reader that it is true. An essay is nothing without a reader. But this is not to say that an essay may be cast out to the multitudes indiscriminately. The first thing that an essay must accomplish is to select a reader. This is the duty of the doorman, who must of course be mindful that the reader does not appear out of the aether. Every reader has a history, has hopes and habits. Every reader has reasons that bring them to an essay. The first sentence of an essay interrogates these reasons. It gets to know them over tea to play with them, to tease them, to judge them. It selects only those who might sacrifice themselves to the purpose of an essay, who might be deeply affected and emerge from its depths a different person with a new history, with new hopes and habits.

We learn from Socrates that the written word is a vulnerable thing, that it may be abducted and used for purposes alien to its own. This threat must be always opposed by the writer. An essay serves a higher calling than to satisfy a reader. But Socrates’ insight is important too: the essay has no power of its own. It cannot fight back against the determined reader. It cannot run. It cannot call for help. If an essay is to avoid Oreithuia’s fate, the writer must be cunning. It must use a reader’s energy against them. And as readers ourselves, all writers know precisely how easy this can be, for we too have been taken in by essays. We too have been destroyed and rebuilt by them. And we too have been told that this is what we have done to ourselves, that we have entrapped ourselves in our effort to abduct an essay. The question that remains is then how we may accomplish this feat for ourselves.

We all understand quite freely from satire and irony that blots of ink may hide an essay, or two or three, between and beyond them. It is the task of the doorman to choose which reader may be allowed to acquaint themselves with which essay. The great writer might of course hide his crimes from the snooping detective while displaying them openly to any sympathetic ghoul or gangster. The masterful writer might even reveal a different essay to every reader who might happen across it and withhold the rest.

But an essay must nevertheless remain accessible. The reader who has hidden every element of an essay has not written an essay; we must always remember that an essay is a dialogue. Its first sentence cannot deny entry to everyone who happens to rap upon its door. We should rather say that a great writer proportions their selection to the readership they wish to address. And this depends upon the properties of that readership. A writer must know them intimately. They must live amongst them. They must laugh with them. They must cry with them. They must know everything that a reader desires and believes and identifies with. To fail this, to write in a way that does not reward or entice a reader, that does not address their concerns, and in which they cannot themselves see, risks soliloquy. And soliloquy is not writing.[1] It is a prison.

The first sentence of an essay dives into the soul of a reader in order to open them to an essay. It preys on their desires, on their spirit, on their judgements. It is deceptive, promising the world only to capture and captivate them, transforming them into a new person. In this, the dual duty of the first sentence of an essay becomes clear. It not only selects a reader: it also prepares them for what an essay will do to them—or rather what they will do to themselves while under the influence of an essay.

To prepare a reader is to crack them open, to loosen up their soul. As the reader labours in panic to put themselves back together, they use the resources that an essay gives them, and an essay takes this opportunity to smuggle a seed deep within.

It is not difficult to open up a reader. One need only present them with the promise of intelligible novelty. This is in essence to play upon those reasons that a reader first comes to an essay, to give them a taste but to hold back on the delivery. Easy as this might be, this is where writers most often fall into error. They so often forget that they are writing in dialogue that they fail to write at all. They instead forgo the norms of a discourse and craft what appear to be words but which have lost their meaning, or they place recognisable words in unrecognisable sentences and call those objections.

This is of course not how writing is done. It belies the central failure of the writer to know their reader and to select them accordingly. For many times a writer selects instead the wrong reader, one who cannot possibly be changed by the marks on the page. For this reader finds only the simplest of errors in these marks and remains therefore closed to the essay. And if this is so, how might an essay change them? How might an essay revolutionise a discourse? How might an essay teach a lesson? How might it even introduce a problem? Can an essay which fails this even be called an essay? Just think of how many trees have been felled, how many forests cleared, how many birds and squirrels mulched in the chaos, how many bears driven to starvation—all for what does not even amount to an essay; all for writers to not even write, but incoherently babble.

So what then shall the writer do? If the writer wishes to write, if the writer wishes to fulfill their destiny, they must first read. They must first live amongst readers and learn their languages and customs. Without this they are lost. They cannot despite their arrogance erect a whole discourse ex nihilo. But where they embrace their humility and accept their humanity, there they might finally write even a single sentence. For this is all that an essay is.

When the first sentence of an essay strikes a reader and tears open their soul, the reader immediately repairs the damage. They now have a new history, new hopes, new desires, new beliefs. And so in striking the reader, the first sentence of an essay changes them, draws them forward into the unknown. Each subsequent sentence now is, now is not, the same essay. The essay ceases, but continues. It embodies a new but old dialogue which now stands in relation to a distinct but indistinct reader. The great writer can make of plurality one and of one plurality. And if a writer cannot do this, gone are the hopes that they may write at all. The sun has set on their writing. It is night.[2]

_______________________

Notes

[1] The writer may write for the reader who shares their body. It would be a mistake to suggest that all thinking is manifest in self-consciousness. The thinking being is not singular but a shifting sea of interrelated modules. Very often the best way for these modules to communicate, because they share a physiology, is to recreate themselves in signs without and convey a message indirectly. Writing is amongst the best means of accomplishing this. But the expression for expression’s sake, display for display’s sake, this is not writing, this is not thought. All writing, all speech, all thought is dialogical. The central task of philosophical logic depends upon this fact.

[2] Or maybe not.