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.
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EssayPersonal Writing2005
This Is Water
David Foster Wallace
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.
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Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
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Street Haunting: A London Adventure
Virginia Woolf
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.
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On Being Ill
Virginia Woolf
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.
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Goodbye to All That
Joan Didion
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.
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Once More to the Lake
E. B. White
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.
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Such, Such Were the Joys
George Orwell
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.
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Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
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.
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Education of a Wandering Man
Louis L'Amour
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.
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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Annie Dillard
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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