What i think, What i am Hoaland
Essay: What I Think, What I Am
By Edward Hoagland
About the
Author
Edwaard Hoagland
Is an American author best known for his nature and travel writing. He has also
written three novels and travel books.
What is the essay about?
The essay “what I think, what I am’’
shows the us the possibilities of mingling (mix or cause the mix together) mind
and feeling, and thought and feeling with form. It shows the accuracy of his observation
that “the fascination (interest or passion) of the mind is the fascination of
the essay? Giving a definition of the essay, Hoagland enumerates the salient
features of the personal essay.
Essay
Our loneliness makes us avid column
readers these days. The personalities in The New York Post, Chicago Daily News,
San Francisco Chronicle constitute our neighbors now, some of them local
characters but also the opinionated national stars. And movie reviewers thrive
on our need for somebody emotional who is willing to pay attention to us and
return week after week, year after year, through all the to‐and‐fro
of other friends to flatter us by pouring out his (her) heart. They are
essayists, as Elizabeth Hardwick is, James Baldwin was. We sometimes hear that
essays are an old‐fashioned form, that so‐and‐so
is the “last essayist,” but the facts of the marketplace argue
quite otherwise. Essays of almost any kind are so much
easier for a writer to sell now than short stories, so many more see print,
it's odd that though two fine anthologies remain which publish the year's best
stories, no comparable collection exists for essays. Such changes in the
reading public's taste aren't always to the good, needless to say. The art of
telling stories predated even cave‐painting, surely; and if we ever find ourselves living in caves
again, it (with painting) will be the only art left, after movies, novels,
essays, photography, biography and all the rest have gone down the drain
One has the sense with the short story
form that while everything may have been done, nothing has been overdone: it
has a permanence. Essays, if a comparison is to be made, although they go back
400 years to Montaigne, seem a newfangled, mercurial, sometimes hokey sort of
affair which has lent itself to many of the excesses of the age, from spurious
autobiography to spurious hallucination. as well as the shabby careerism of traditional
journalism. It's a greased pig. Es
Edward Hoagland has written fiction and
essays in equal quantity; his new collection of essays is called “Red Wolves
and Black Bears.” says are associated with the way young writers fashion a
name—on plain, crowded newsprint in hybrid vehicles like The Village Voice,
Rolling Stone, The Soho Weekly News (also Fiction magazine), instead of the
thick paper stock and thin readership of Partisan Review.
Essays,
however, hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: this is what I
think, and this is what I am. Autobiographies which aren't novels are,
generally extended essays, indeed. A personal essay is like the human voice
talking, its order the mind's natural flow, instead of a systematized outline
of ideas. Though more wayward or informal than an article or treatise,
somewhere it contains a point which is its real center, even if the point
couldn't be expressed in fewer words than the essayist has employed. Essays
don't usually “boil down” to a summary, as articles do, but on the other hand
they have fewer “levels” than first‐rate fiction—a flatter surface—because we aren't supposed to argue
about their meaning. In the old distinction between teaching versus story‐telling
however cleverly the author muddies up—an essay is intended to convey the each
of
This emphasis upon mind
speaking to mind is what makes essays less universal in their appeal than
stories. They are addressed to an educated, perhaps a middleclass, reader, with
certain presuppositions shared, a frame of reference, even a commitment to
civility—not the grand and golden empathy inherent in every man which the story‐teller has a chance to tap. At the same time, of
course, the artful “I” of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction; and
essays do tell a story just as often as a short story stakes a claim to a
particular viewpoint.
Mark Twain's piece called “Corn‐pone
Opinions,” for example, which
is about public opinion, begins with a vignette as vivid as any in “Huckleberry Finn.” When he was a boy of 15, Twain says,
he used to hang out a back window and listen to the sermons preached by a
neighbor's slave standing on top of a woodpile. The fellow “imitated the pulpit
style of the several clergymen of the village, and did it well and with fine
passion and energy. To me he was a wonder. I believed he was the greatest
orator in the United States and would some day be heard from. But it did not
happen; in the distribution of rewards he was overlooked. He interrupted his
preaching now and then to saw a stick of wood, but the sawing was a’
pretense—he did it with his mouth; exactly imitating the sound the bucksaw
makes in shrieking its way through the wood. But it served its purpose, it kept
his master from coming out
The extraordinary flexibility of essays is what has enabled them to
ride oat rough weather and hybridize into forms to suit the times. And just as
one of the first things a fiction writer learns is that he needn't actually be
writing fiction to write a short story—he can tell his own history or anyone
else's as exactly as he remembers it and it will still be “fiction” if it
remains primarily a story—an essayist soon discovers that he doesn't have to
tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth; he can shape or shave his
memories as long as the purpose is served of elucidating a truthful point. A
personal essay frequently is not autobiographical at all, but what it does keep
in common with autobiography is that, through its tone and tumbling
progression, it conveys the quality of the author's mind. Nothing gets in the
way. Because essays are directly concerned with the mind and its idiosyncrasy, (a
mode of behavior way of thought peculiar) to an individual the very freedom the
mind possesses Is bestowed on this branch of literature that does honor to it,
and the fascination of the mind is the fascination
Questions:
1.
What are the similarities and differences, as Hoagland maintains,
between essay on one hand and story, article, autobiography on the other?
2.
What
is the relationship between what you think and what you are?
3.
Fascination
of the mind in the fascination (of the essay) Explain
4.
What
does Hoagland mean when he says that essays “hang somewhere on a line between
two sturdy poles: this is what I think, and is what I am?
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