Essay Assay

A few days back, I was sent a link to an essay by Neal Stephenson, (author of Anathem, The Baroque cycle, Cryptonomicon and other novels).  It is In the Beginning was the Command Line, and is an extended, detailed disquisition on operating systems and other stuff.  Like universes and so forth. 

And it kind of reminded me of The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond from around 1999 onwards (I think - it evolves).

Then, yesterday, while reading an entertaining book about typefaces and fonts ("Just My Type: A Book About Fonts", by Simon Garfield, 2010),  I came acros a strong recommendation for Eric Gill's "Essay on Typography" from 1931.

All of this made me want to essay some thoughts about Essays. 

It seems obvious from at least two of the examples above that the form is far from dead.  Rather, it has acquired a huge new lease of life via the Internet - but also some recent striking newspaper essays impressed me.   For exmple. a Simon Schama article for the NYT springs to mind from around six years ago, on radical American history and how it might act as a key for challenging right-wing responses to 9/11.

Essays are not just non-fiction books.  They - ideally - should be shorter, and more focused.  So neither On The Origin Of The Species nor The Principia Mathematica counts an essay.  For me, On Fairy Stories just scrapes under the wire.

And the latter also hints at another aspect of essays - they are usually colloquial, and accessible.  They may even, like On Fairy Stories, have begun as talks or lectures.  But typically not political speeches.  Repackaging the Gettysburg Address does not make it an essay.

And the really great essays may often be annoying.  They get under the skin, and you disagree with them -while at the same time being carried along by the prose.

They have influence - they live on, people remember them and cite them, continue to laugh along with them -or build scientific or other academic disciplines based upon them

So here then is a short, random selection of essays (loosely defined, some other short nonfiction is in it) that seem to me reasonably seminal, or interesting or something.  As a general note, I will admit to a gneral European rather than American bias.  For which no apologies. And for no readily discernable reason, they are arranged in date order.

Commentariolus, Copernicus, Nicholas, 1514.  This is his short outline/precis of what later became "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium." (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres).  In other words one of the most significant scientific works of the renaissance.

Of Friendship, Bacon, Francis, 1625. Bacon wrote many esays, of course, but this is one of the best.

Areopagitica, Milton, John, 1644.  On the freedon of speech - Milton's great anti-censorship polemic.

The Education of Women, Defoe, Daniel, 1719.  He's in favour, of course.

A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public, Swift, Jonathan, 1729.   OK so who hasn't read this?  Really?  Stop reading this blog now and go and read this essay at once.  It's essential.  Now read it again.  Good, isn't it?

Advice on the Choice of a Mistress, Franklin, Benjamin, 1745.  Just because it is funny...

And now it's time for Hazlitt - so much loved and eulogised by the late, great Michael Foot.  Many to choose from, but I limited the selection to three:

On Corporate Bodies, William Hazlitt, c.1821.  Marvellous splenetic rant. "Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill"

On Going a Journey, William Hazlitt, c.1821.  This is the witty, calm, poised iconoclastic Hazlitt grabbing a subject and dealing with it at length.

On The Pleasure Of Hating, William Hazlitt, c.1826.  For my own part, as I once said, I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about. 

The Chemical History of a Candle, Faraday, Michael, 1860.  I can't really claim this as an essay in all honesty, but what the hell..  Probably Faraday's most famous Christmas lecture series.

On The Decay of the Art Of Lying, Twain, Mark, 1882.   Lying nees to be done properly. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde, Oscar, 1891.  Paradoxical, libertarian, artistic, witty, human and annoying in equal measures.

De Profundis, Wilde, Oscar, 1897.  Really, a letter to Douglas written from Reading jail.

Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Woolf, Virginia, 1923. A beautiful, great modernist blast against Arnold Bennet and the "realist" novel.

On Being the Right Size, Haldane, J.B.S, 1928.  A beautiful short piece and the origin of the notion  that a horse splashes.

A Hanging, Orwell, George, 1931.  Classic reportage and feeling. 

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin, Walter, 1936.  Still fresh and relevant, despite the fact that we are several generations of technology on.

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien, J.R.R., 1936.  It could be argued that this was the first piece of writing that really began to understand and sympathise with Beowulf.
 
If Hazlitt has to be limited to just three essays then the same must apply to Orwell. But it is hard, very hard.

Wells, Hitler and the World State, Orwell, George, 1941.  Timely, precise, astonishing.

Decline of the English Murder, Orwell, George, 1946.  Famous and rightly so.

On Fairy Stories, Tolkien, J.R.R., 1947.  Could be said to have been the piece that kicked off a whole industry of thinking and thought about fantasy and the fantastic.

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, Feynman, Richard P., 1959.  The founding text, I think, of nanotechnology.

Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Derrida, Jacques, 1966.  The real secret joy of this piece is just how impenetrable it is!

The Death of the Author, Barthes, Roland, 1967.  Arguifying against the establishment ways of seeing art and culture - and winning...

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Sokal, Alan D., 1994.  And finally, the only possible, and wholly necessary, corrective to the Derrida and his brethren.

Size and Scale

Of course, to understand size, you need to understand scale.
See here for help.

Haldane and Engel's Thoughts

In On Being the Right Size, Haldane worries about how well socialism might run large organisations, but remains silent regarding the ability of capitalism and representative democracy to do the same.  He wrote the essay just before the stock market crash of course, and in our own time we have  witnessed the substantial failiure of the Western banking system, built around capitalism.  So it is at the very least a legitimate question to ask.

By coincidence, it is also one of the questions which drives Matthew Engel's Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain (revised edition, 2010), which I got for Christmas.  He makes a whole series of telling points.  For example: 

- That Bitain's railways, originally created through the competition of entrepreneurial capitalists, are inefficient, poorly organised in terms of routes and stations, and much less effective than the later continental railways.  The latter were far more commonly state-planned and delivered - and all the better for it. 

- That the influence of politicians, almost universally with short-term interests, on the railways has been pretty much entirely malign or ineffectual - not least because of their relatively short-term planning horizon, which is wholly inappropriate for creating and sustaining a major National infrastructure and service.

- That as a result of both of these effects there has been little or no true strategic thinking regarding the railways in Britain for most of their life.  And it truly shows.

And barely needs to be said that many of his arguments about rail could be readily extended to the rest of British life.  He's fairly unsparing (although always a good read).

Inordinately

Mentioning Haldane a post or two ago couldn't help but remind me of  his famous saying about God being 'inordinately fond of beetles'.  Which upon further examination is hard to track down. The Quote Investigator site seems to summarise what we know quite well.

And the phrase certainly gets around, including Pterry's conclusion that the God who is fond of beetles is - paradoxically - the God of Evolution (see The Lost Continent)...

Its also worth noting that On Being the Right Size does not end up as an essay about comparative anatomy.  The last two paragraphs read:

And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. The English invention of representative government made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States, and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible for every citizen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the referendum has been made possible only by the institution of daily newspapers.



To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.

So he's actually using arguments from biology to question whether socialism is able to run large Nation states or Empires.  Can it ever be used effectively to run the British Empire?  Haldane was a socialist for much of his life, but he could and did apply a sense of scientific scepticism to his ideology.
 
He was a somewhat controversial figure to some. From Wikipedia:

Haldane was a friend of the author Aldous Huxley, who parodied him in the novel Antic Hay (1923) as Shearwater, "the biologist too absorbed in his experiments to notice his friends bedding his wife". Haldane's discourse in Daedalus on ectogenesis was an influence on Huxley's Brave New World (1932) which features a eugenic society.
C.S. Lewis wrote much of his three interplanetary space novels, The Space Trilogy, in response to Haldane, whom Lewis considered to be an immoral man. Lewis modelled the character Weston, featured in the first two books, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, on Haldane.

- and Weston is of course the baddie. 

Much of this also ties in quite nicely with the Mark Miodownik RI Christmas lectures (not the bit about sleeping with his wife, but the  linking across disciplines and the predictive, futures-oriented visionary scientific rhetoric).

And of course Haldane was known for a clutch of other quotations, including:

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], p.286

and:

Theories have four stages of acceptance:
i. this is worthless nonsense,
ii. this is interesting, but perverse,
iii. this is true, but quite unimportant,
iv. I always said so

(Source unknown)

Which sounds a very familiar position, to me at least.

On Size and the RI Christmas Lecture

This year's RI Christmas Lecture was given by Mark Miodownik, Head of the Materials Research Group in the Natural and Mathematical Sciences School at King's College London.  Appropriately approachable in suit and trainers and a slightly hesitant speaking style, he did rather well I thought.  His topic was 'Size Matters' and he covered a lot of ground.

For example, he discussed the old question of why small animals can survive long falls and large ones can't (using crash test pets).  He did this quite well - but I wish he'd mentioned J.B.S Haldane's famous 1928 essay (On Being the Right Size):

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal's length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.

OK, I suppose perhaps not quite right for his young audience - commendably brief but the Christmas Lecture requires more spectacle (the crash test pet dog did splash...). 

Anyway, Miodownik covered this, why larger animals are cumbersome (can't dance), the relative strengths of creatures (against there body weight), and so forth, before he moved on to strange materials and then to very large scale structures.  He gave three lectures (I seem to remember recent speakers giving four?  maybe that is a false memory).   The last lecture took us from how high a building might we be able to build one day, given the limitations of the Earth's surface as a base to start from, to the space elevator, by way of carbon nanotubes.  It ended with him on wires, high above his audience and a model of the earth, paying out model nanotube cable to get the elevator going.

There is a kind of convention whereby the Christmas Lecturer ends by exhorting the younger generation to discover new things and follow in the scientific and/or technological footsteps of their parents and predecessors... He did this bit especially well, I thought - moving from the moon landings of the 60s and 70s to the possibilities of the space elevator - if they can do it.

His delivery was hesitant, as I said, and there seemed to be a large number of strange diversions into different types of new material which at the time I thought didn't really aid his argument much, but in retrospect that was too critical of me.  The whole piece came together very well, and worked.  I ended up feeling quite inspired by the dangling man.

And it was back on the BBC where it belongs.