There is something slightly odd about launching a website devoted to essayism.
The longer I have worked on Essayism.org, the more I have come to suspect that essayism cannot really be discovered through definitions. It has to be encountered in practice. For me, that practice began long before my thoughts dwelt on Montaigne. He was merely a name in a school classroom.
As a schoolboy, I was already writing pieces that began not with answers but with tensions. Something in the world would not quite fit. An explanation that everyone accepted seemed incomplete. A relationship between things would catch my attention. Writing became a way of following the question. I would not have called it essaying.
At fourteen, I doubt I could have defined an essay beyond the requirements of school. Yet looking back, I suspect Montaigne would have recognised the impulse immediately. So too, perhaps, would Addison and Steele, whose popularisation of the craft delighted me, helping to carry the essay from the private study, into the café and the corner house.
The subjects I wrote of changed over the years but the habit remained remarkably constant. Again and again I found myself drawn less to facts than to relationships. Less to conclusions than to processes. Less to what something was, than to how it had become what it was.
Only much later did I encounter Montaigne himself. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we became acquainted. Like many readers, I first approached him through his reputation. The inventor of the essay. The retired mayor of Bordeaux. The French gentleman writing in a tower in south-west France. The distant figure from literary history.
What I discovered instead was something unexpectedly familiar. Montaigne was not proclaiming doctrines. He was thinking on the page. He was following observations wherever they led. He was examining experience as something unfinished and perpetually unfolding.
The deeper companionship, however, emerged not through reading but through building. For a number of years I have been engaged in the renovation of a sixteenth-century house in south-west France. Alongside it stands a barn whose walls were originally part of a tower house and château, the very culture into which Montaigne’s mother was born. History sits lightly in such places until one starts to work on them.
A beam, a wall, a doorway, a repair carried out centuries ago. Every intervention reveals traces of previous interventions. Every structure becomes a record of change through time. Nothing is entirely finished. Nothing is entirely original. Everything emerges from what came before.
Standing in that barn, looking at stones and beams that had once formed part of another structure entirely, I found myself asking questions that were unmistakably essayistic. Not what is this? but what has this become? Not what was intended? but what emerged? Not what conclusion should be drawn? but what relationships are now visible? In a curious way, the old stones became companions in inquiry.
The renovation taught me something that years of reading alone could not. Essaying is not simply a literary activity. It is an orientation toward the world. It is a willingness to attend to processes, relationships, transformations, and tensions. The page merely provides one place in which that attention can become visible.
Essayism.org emerges from that realisation.
The site is not intended as a monument to a settled doctrine. It is a working surface. A place to examine what essaying is, how it has appeared in different writers, and why it continues to matter in a world increasingly impatient for immediate certainty.
Montaigne gave us a word. Other essayists developed a tradition. My own contribution, if there is one, is simply to continue the inquiry.
David Marshall.
Flic en Flac
September 2026