Essay quote: 300 words

The Ideal Essay: In reading an esay, I want to feel that I'm communing with a real person, and a person who cares about what he or she's writing about. The words sound sentimental and trite, but the qualities are rare. For me, the ideal essay is not an assignment, to be dispatched efficiently and intelligently, but an exploration, a questioning, an intrspection. I want to see a piece of the essayist. I want to see a mind at work, imagining spinning, struggling to understand. If the essayist has all the answers, then he isn't stuggling to grasp, and I won't either. When you care about something, you continually grapple with it, because it is alive in you. It thrashes and moves, like all living things....
-Alan Lightman

After reading through all the quotes about essays I chose to write on this one because I feel the same way the author does. To me the ideal essay needs to be a passionate one, not something that the writer doesn't care about. And in no way am I accusing any writer of being a nonchalant author either. I just feel that the best works are the ones that you can almost see and feel the emotion that the writer puts into the text. I like how Alan Lightman says, "...when you care about something you continually grapple with it..." I can identify with what, in my mind, he's trying to say. In my opinion, readers, in general, enjoy reading more when there is a tangible emotion that they can identify with rather than something they may consider a, "dry" subject. And when the reader can sense the author's passion for the subject, some of the same passion can rub off on the reader. Also when Lightman says that you continually grapple with what you care about, I find that happens to me, regardless of the topic of what you care about. When you find something that you truly care about you can't just pass it by and leave it behind, you want to explore it and examine it from all angles and understand the subject fully. And if the author can fully know his passion, maybe his writing can impart some of his thirst to the reader. Lighman also says, "...I want to feel that I'm communing with a real person..." This is also a byproduct of the passion for writing. The reader can in a sense, get to know the author and explore his feelings and views. Making the author a real person with real emotion rather than some impersonal ghost. The bottom line is that to really know the writing and understand it you should see the origins of where the author is coming from and see his motives and emotion through his writing.