Room to think

Writing as a place you enter

“The Leisure Suite,” collage, 2021

Hey y’all,

Our friend Elisa Gabbert recently published an essay about essays called “The Essay as Realm.” 

”An essay, she writes, “is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place. It has to give one the feeling of entering a room.” 

The essay comes from her love of architecture books and what she’s learned about writing from reading them:

I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space…. by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm. It’s a place where all my best thinking can go for a period of time, a place where the thoughts can be collected and arranged for more density of meaning. This place necessarily has structure, if it feels like a place.

She writes about writing essays as building buildings and reading and re-reading essays as visiting and revisiting spaces.

”When I’m writing, I’m trying to be an architect,” she writes. “I’m trying to get the reader to feel the way I do.” 

This lecture I’ve been working on has itself become a place. It started as notes, ideas on paper, but as I built them into sentences and paragraphs it took on the impression of a frame. There’s a point when the frame seems finished; I’m reluctant to change the fundamental shape. But I’m adding walls and doors and windows, light fixtures, furniture. I’m building from the inside. All of this is functional, but also aesthetic. What kind of place do you want to be in?

I am married to a person with advanced degrees in architecture, so I have absorbed a great deal of thinking about buildings through osmosis. I’ve also read a lot of the books that Elisa mentions. While I have a few quibbles about the lessons she’s taken from books about architecture (“I don’t trust books that aren’t a little boring”), I do like this idea of essays as rooms to think in.

A tower collage from 2020

I usually read whatever Elisa writes the minute it publishes, but I’m glad I saved this essay because I’ve been reading one of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays every day for the past 3 weeks to avoid a.m. doomscrolling.