And this depends upon the properties of that readership. We should rather say that a great writer proportions their selection to the readership they wish to address. Its first sentence cannot deny entry to everyone who happens to rap upon its door. The reader who has hidden every element of an essay has not written an essay we must always remember that an essay is a dialogue. The masterful writer might even reveal a different essay to every reader who might happen across it and withhold the rest.īut an essay must nevertheless remain accessible. The great writer might of course hide his crimes from the snooping detective while displaying them openly to any sympathetic ghoul or gangster. It is the task of the doorman to choose which reader may be allowed to acquaint themselves with which essay. We all understand quite freely from satire and irony that blots of ink may hide an essay, or two or three, between and beyond them. The question that remains is then how we may accomplish this feat for ourselves. And we too have been told that this is what we have done to ourselves, that we have entrapped ourselves in our effort to abduct an essay. We too have been destroyed and rebuilt by them. And as readers ourselves, all writers know precisely how easy this can be, for we too have been taken in by essays. It must use a reader’s energy against them. If an essay is to avoid Oreithuia’s fate, the writer must be cunning. It cannot fight back against the determined reader. But Socrates’ insight is important too: the essay has no power of its own. An essay serves a higher calling than to satisfy a reader.
This threat must be always opposed by the writer.
We learn from Socrates that the written word is a vulnerable thing, that it may be abducted and used for purposes alien to its own. It selects only those who might sacrifice themselves to the purpose of an essay, who might be deeply affected and emerge from its depths a different person with a new history, with new hopes and habits. It gets to know them over tea to play with them, to tease them, to judge them. The first sentence of an essay interrogates these reasons. Every reader has reasons that bring them to an essay. Every reader has a history, has hopes and habits. This is the duty of the doorman, who must of course be mindful that the reader does not appear out of the aether. The first thing that an essay must accomplish is to select a reader. But this is not to say that an essay may be cast out to the multitudes indiscriminately. For an essay is an attempt, an attempt to not only establish some thesis, but convince its reader that it is true.
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And so to understand how to write a great essay, one must understand how a great essay is read. They understand that all of these activities are intelligible only in dialogue, in discourse, in relation to what the reader brings to an essay. They don’t merely have the best arguments.
Great writers therefore are not merely great theorists. The first sentence of an essay begins and therefore embodies a dialogue. It would be quite obscene to follow the latter and not the former with a dingy mansion and rows of coffins. The reader expects something quite different to follow from the pale butler with a posh, monotone accent than the dashing server who greets with a smooth voice and a smile. The first sentence of an essay is a doorman who invites the reader into the world that will unfold within what succeeds it.
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