This Is Water
Wallace's commencement talk on the daily, unglamorous work of choosing what to pay attention to. Better on the actual texture of adult life than almost anything filed under mindfulness.
view similar →Personal Writing
Self-Reliance
Emerson telling you, at length and at full volume, to trust your own mind against the pull of the crowd. Overquoted to the edge of cliché, and still startling read whole.
view similar →Street Haunting: A London Adventure
Woolf invents an errand — buying a pencil — as an excuse to walk London at dusk and dissolve into everything she passes. The plainest demonstration anywhere of attention itself as a subject.
view similar →On Being Ill
Woolf asks why illness, so central to being alive, has almost no literature, and then writes the missing piece herself. She keeps noticing exactly what medicine steps over.
view similar →Goodbye to All That
Didion on falling out of love with New York, and with a version of herself, without a drop of self-pity. The template for every leaving-the-city essay since, and still better than all of them.
view similar →Once More to the Lake
White takes his son to the lake of his own boyhood and feels the generations blur, until one cold sentence at the end. Effortless-looking prose doing genuinely difficult work.
view similar →Such, Such Were the Joys
Orwell's account of an English boarding school, settling old scores while examining his own resentments in the same breath. He refuses to let himself off the hook, which is what makes it trustworthy.
view similar →The Death of the Moth
A moth dies on a windowpane and Woolf watches the entire drama of living and dying play out at that scale. Almost nothing happens, and it turns out to be about everything.
view similar →Meditations
Notes a Roman emperor wrote to steady himself, never meant for anyone else's eyes. The privacy is the power — a powerful man talking himself into being decent, over and over.
view similar →Education of a Wandering Man
L'Amour's memoir of educating himself in boxcars and mining camps with a library card and pure stubbornness. Concrete and unsentimental about what a self-made reading life actually demands.
view similar →Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Dillard spends a year looking very hard at one Virginia creek and reports back on horror and wonder in roughly equal measure. The looking is the whole book, and it turns out to be enough.
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