Nobody Reads Essays Anymore

What short stories are to Novels, essays are to … well, all non-fiction.

I am approaching being almost a Century old, and so my tastes may be somewhat outdated, but they ought not to be. But my literary tastes grew up reading essays – Johnson’s “Rambler” and “Idler” and the essays of Addison and Steel, and then the translations from the French, as the Age of Enlightenment overwhelmed us with essays. Then I found that all modern Newspaper Editorials were written in the same old Essay Format… maybe a minute or two shorter, but not by much.

All pithy and, at their best, humorous documents that could be easily read in one sitting. They were the half-hour Sitcoms of the Pre-TV Age.

But nobody wants to read for even a few minutes nowadays.

Perhaps the Brave New World Propagandists had won. By instilling tastes in literature that prohibit the expansion of any thought for longer than 3 minutes, well, The Simplistic View of Republicanism and Toryism (as the Nazis had triumphed before on much the same model) certainly will prevail. Oh, not that the Atheist Left does not want to profit likewise… as they also favor a format that favors an Assertion of Attack… not requiring more than 50 words, which is assumed to be at least the equivalent of a Revealed Religion from a God in which they no longer believe, but from whom they are still willing to suppose gives them a sense for Absolute Truth, whereby assertions are free to fly without the least concern for elaboration.

So it is that people give short opinions – what they ‘think’ without bothering to tell us how they ‘think’ at all. We get Conclusions without being told how such conclusions were arrived at. It all leads one to suspect that these conclusions are not conclusions at all, but mere assertions… what people WISH to believe.

But Essays used to keep people honest. There they could not confuse the positions of Assertion and Conclusion. But those people who, today, argue against the Essay Format, well, it is entirely in their interest that assertion and conclusion SEEM to be the same thing. They would want you to think that anything they say is True without having to explain why.