A writer must be vigilant, an essayist especially so. You probably heard that more at school or in creative writing classes than you read it on Substack. But there are some signposts here.
A writer must be vigilant - about what? Grammar, plagiarism, correcting spelling, what?. Tell me, because I do all those things, well not the plagiarism obviously. They are the mark of writer with a competent skills set. I once saw a pharmacist chide a trainee, for not placing a prescription label, perfectly, horizontally, across the bottle. “If you can’t be bothered to get that right, what else can’t you be bothered with?” So yes I’m vigilant. I don’t want you judging the quality of what I say by the accuracy of my punctuation or the simplicity of my phrases. That’s what revision is for. Right?
And then I notice a sentence a paragraph or two further up. I could have blessed that with a little more elegance, So I make a minor change or two. Another sentence another change, and so on. Now the whole piece gleams in pristine elegance. I re-read it. It’s true, when I put my mind to it I can create a really beautiful sentence.
I feel the cold flash of the vanity before I can name it.
Suddenly I’m the seventeen year old back in the Lower Sixth. I hear “Obfuscated by a fog of words”. Bone fides Marshall, bone fides. Fidelity to what you think. A rolled-up newspaper collides with the back of my head. “What has to be done to get it into that thick skull? Vigilance to bonne foi the responsibility to the thought to convey it openly and honestly.”
It does seep in, somehow over the years. Encounters with collective action, with disappointment, and minds that have coped, like Michelle de Montaigne. I see it now bonne foi, is not fidelity to some master external model, not the Catholic church for Montaigne, nor the promise of socialism for a young Marshall. Neither is it about matching a template of how an essay should sound, or how an expert should speak. It is the disciplined, accurate presentation of your own tested thought. It is the responsibility to report the mind’s movement exactly as it happened, wrinkles and all.
When we abandon that fidelity to the description of our own thought for nothing more than a gleaming phrase, we fall into a specific trap. I call it the
Cassiopeia Complex.
In the old myth, Cassiopeia boasts endlessly of her unmatched surface beauty. And her daughter, Andromeda, pays the price, left chained to the rocks to suffer for her mother’s vanity. So it is on the page. The beautiful, polished sentence is Cassiopeia. The fragile, emergent thought is Andromeda. The sentence boasts; the thought suffers. We become so enamoured with the cadence and the shine of our own language that we quietly abandon the very perception that drove us to write in the first place. We leave the truth chained to the rocks just so the paragraph can look elegant.
Perhaps paradoxically the act of vigilance becomes a survival mechanism for the essayist’s mind. The essayistic disposition leaves the writer bare in the world, and easy to wound. Disappointment in what we hope, in the outcomes of what we perceive, in the behaviours of others, the decay of consensus, the rewards of alternative postures. All challenge our ability to survive without falling into cynicism or dogma. But the very act of essaying, of beginning and remaining with bonne foi, of honesty in stance, attention and even in sharing in disappointment, gives us the emotional resilience to continue.
And it begins by remaining faithful to the raw, unpolished thought. The moment we give in to the temptation to tidy up the mess, to pave over the jagged edges of our experience with elegant, settled conclusions, we risk a dangerous step. We either descend into the cheap comfort of cynicism, or we begin manufacturing a false, performative honesty out of our disappointments. The cynic finishes the sentence beautifully because he wants to close the wound and escape the uncertainty. But the essayist must use language to keep it open. Not because suffering is noble, but because that unresolved ache is the only place where genuine insight can still live.