essays are like encyclopedias, existing in and around other texts, and essayists bring things together in lists, channeling the associative impulse

Thomas Browne’s “idea of the essay as collection or repository—or an idea of the museum as essay.”

that there are others out there who are as particular and peculiar and strange as ourselves, whose feelings are as motile and contradictory as our own, each with her own style

Whitmanesque moments

essayism is itself a style

the studium , which is the explicit subject of the image, the information we learn from it; and the punctum , “that aspect (often a detail) of a photograph that holds our gaze without condescending to mere meaning or beauty.”

In its independence, it’s something closer to a poem—or, to use a metaphor Dillon hints at, a photograph.

Unlike an instruction manual or a polemic or a speech, the essay isn’t merely a technology for informing or persuading an audience. It has much more to do, at least at first glance, with the writer; the work it may do on the reader is secondary to the intellectual or emotional itch it scratches for the essayist.

“a form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure.”