An essay aspires to the condition of literature. In this it differs from journalism, speeches, sermons, editorials, history, and most expository prose, which aim at an immediate effect. Literature seeks readers in a far tomorrow. While the attempt to create literature is common, success is rare.

                  To want to create literature may be a form of lunacy, but so is heaven or any dreamy goal. Such crazy aspirations give a life direction and zest. A goal too modest bores a busy brain; bored brains make mischief (or misery, a form of mischief).

                  An essayist’s focus differs from an immediate author’s. An immediate author, by observing their audience, can gauge their success. Are sales good, hearers nodding, one’s opinions stirring comment? If, as sometimes happens, occasional words achieve lasting recognition, that’s a bonus. Did Lincoln mean to speak to the ages in his three-minute talk inaugurating the Gettysburg Cemetery? One doubts it. 

                  To be read in posterity one must speak words that will interest the unborn. How to guess what those might be? Current events are excluded, if addressed specifically. Likewise the famous of the moment, whose names swiftly fade. Other human concerns feel eternal. Life, death, choosing, making sense, rearing, loving, losing, fear, joy, beauty, truth, ambition, civility will forever vex our species. An able author’s take on these perdurable puzzles stands a chance, albeit slim, of interesting a future speculative reader.

                  If quotidian actualities are discussed, as they must be, to ground one’s words in recognizable reality, these specifics must be metaphorized, so they stand for the same mental state in a different epoch. Nobody wangled this better than Shakespeare. Hamlet and Macbeth do not live in Denmark or Scotland, they live in our imaginations. While Shakespeare cared – deeply – about pleasing his audience, he wrote sub specie aeternitatis, in the gaze of eternity – God knows how.

                  The essayist must speak in a voice both pleasing and peculiarly their own. The polite prose of any age seldom makes posterity’s cuts. One must feel the character of the communicator steaming through their cadences – in their rhythms, music, quirks, winks. It’s never what’s said that wafts, but how. Bacon, Thomas Browne, Dr. Johnson, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Ruskin, Emerson, Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, E.B. White, James Baldwin you can instantly hear approaching as you can a loved one from their footsteps. Yet one must beware overdoing peculiarity, for nobody likes a show-off. (Please note, Thomas Carlyle.)

                  Urgency is the next precondition for a pass to Parnassus. The speaker must say what they’re saying and they ache for you to hear. They’re not filling but fulfilling their time. Their topic may be breezy – a walk in the woods, say – but their need is fierce. Thoreau, my favorite essayist, almost bursts from the pages he’s so determined to show me what he’s found. 

                  None of these attributes can be taught or learned. One may note an absence but not how to fill it. The soul’s shape is as predetermined as the body’s.

                  Why aim for eternity? In my case, for fun. In my tennis years, I thrilled to test myself against players I could never beat. So in my writing years.

                  Love also spurs me. I love my reader of the future as Thoreau loved me, hugged me in a dark hour, heard me out, cheered me on. That future love heartens me – even now – though its likelihood’s slight. 

                  Finally – the oldest motive for makers – by creating durably one may thwart time and cheat death, at least for a spell.