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

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.

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

essayism is itself a style

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

Whitmanesque moments

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.

The first practitioner of the form, the 16th-century French politician and minor aristocrat Michel de Montaigne, never said what an essay was.