Not Just a Number

By Peter Clothier

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The writing itself will take the form I have come to embrace in recent years as the one in which I feel most comfortable, and in which I am writing now: the essay. I started out my writer’s journey as a poet, when I was still a teenager. Over the years I have ventured into criticism, academic writing, fiction, memoirs, even political polemic — and I can claim some modest success in every genre. But I have finally had the good sense to embrace the essay as my own. Nothing pleased me more, in all the responses to Persist, than the comment from a critic who noted an affinity with the sixteenth century French essayist, Michel de Montaigne. What an honor, to be mentioned in the same breath as this most excellent practitioner of the form I have come to love! How much would I wish to emulate the profound, intensely personal and deceptively easy elegance of a writer I so deeply admire for his wisdom and his insight into the workings of the human mind, and whose purpose was so similar to my own!

Now that I come to think of it, I can actually pinpoint the time and place of my earliest discovery of this peculiar passion. I close my eyes and visualize a sunlit classroom on the second floor of the “new” wing of a school that would seem ancient by California standards, one of those second-tier English boarding schools dating back to the late nineteenth century — not an Eton by any means, believe me, but a respectable middle-class institution of privileged education. Its older classrooms — I associate them with Latin and other tedious studies required of us — were dark, almost subterranean, claustrophobic. But this would have been the new wing, with windows open to the fresh air in the spring and summer, and a pleasantly distracting view out over the gravel courtyard where our housemaster, Tiger, parked his wheezing old Morris roadster.

It’s an English class. We have been assigned an essay. My classmates groan. But when my effort comes back to me the following day, it is with glowing comments from the English master. A small thing, perhaps. But in the context of a school where I was experiencing the full force and misery of teenage angst, where I felt always out of place and pitifully lacking in the skills and social poise possessed by everyone around me, this was truly a ray of brilliant sunlight. I had discovered something I could do, and could do well.

I have written many essays since that time without actually thinking of them as such: I have written hundreds of book and art reviews, newspaper columns and articles and, since the advent of the Internet, daily blog entries. But it is only recently that I have fully identified and celebrated my comfort with the medium. That said, I am clear about the fact that the essay is not an “easy sell,” especially in book form. People read essays all the time without being conscious of the fact that they are reading them and, perhaps for this reason, shy away from them when presented in the form of a book. They prefer stories. I venture forth, then, with a clear awareness of the risk, and with the knowledge that if I have stories to tell, they will have to be in essay form.

For me, finally, writing the essay is much like writing poetry. It’s a dance with words, concise and hopefully elegant. Its brevity appeals to me, in an age when every book, fiction or non-fiction, seems overstuffed with vastly more pages than are necessary, and where more and bigger seem the norm in every aspect of our lives. More space, more words, more money, more celebrity… we can never have enough. So I relish the opportunity to be brief, to say what I need to say and then shut up. I will try to honor that predilection as we proceed. •

(Excerpted from Mind Work: Shedding Delusions on the Path to the Creative Core by Peter Clothier)

© 2012 Peter Clothier. All rights reserved.

About the Author | More by Peter Clothier
Peter Clothier writes chiefly about art and artists in Southern California. He has published widely in national magazines, and is the author of David Hockney in the Abbeville Modern Masters series. A former academic, now twenty years in recovery, he is currently a full-time free-lance writer. He has published two novels, two books of poetry and a memoir, “While I Am Not Afraid.” His daily writing practice includes two blogs, The Buddha Diaries and Persist: The Blog; following last year's “Persist: In Praise of the Creative Spirit in a World Gone Mad with Commerce” (Parami Press, 2010), his latest publication is "Mind Work: Shedding Delusions on the Path to the Creative Core" (Parami Press, 2012.) For more information on Peter and his work please visit PeterClothier.com.

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