by Rebecca Hyde Rowan Public Library

by Rebecca Hyde  Rowan Public Library

                For some of us, self dialogue comes and goes, and it’s often annoying and exhausting.  Sven Birkerts crafts his conversations into essays, linking the present moment, a detail or item, to the past through self-questioning. 

                A photo, a lighter, a stone shard  –  these are objects Birkerts picks up and examines as he reconsiders his life.  For the reader, the objects are clues that reveal Birkerts as the bookseller, son, parent, young writer, and middle-aged author, who can be funny, regretful, astute, or meditative.

                 The first essay, “The Other Walk,” is an introduction to his style of self-examination.  The time is “this morning,” and a middle-aged Birkerts sets out on his routine early walk.  But “going against all convention,” he turns right instead of left and takes his circuit in reverse.  What was routine is now re-examined from a new perspective, which gives rise to new questions.  Why hasn’t he written about this topic (his early morning walks) before?  He used to walk because of sleeplessness (“edgy, anxious midlife”), not to see anything but to get into the day, in a way he could tolerate.  Why walk now?  He walks to set up his writing day, to start his thinking, testing the hardness of a thought against the rhythms of walking, or simply get the sense of the day, a prelude.

                “Lighter” is an examination of things lost and found, of memories accumulated and deleted.  Birkerts plays with a cigarette lighter, which appears in a package from his brother, who found it among the accumulated stuff in the old family home that’s to be sold.  He feels “the quick flash of wires making first contact,” and it’s the lighter of fifty-years ago, his father’s old prize from the war, which Birkerts took apart for study on the drafting table.  There was a “scene,” when his father came home from the office.  That second-guessing fizzled when Birkerts saw his engraved initials.   A gift from whom?  There’s no pulse of recollection.  But there are questions like “What kind of friend am I?” or “If this, then what else?”  How much of his living has moved out of reach?  It’s like a memory film, “a whole forgotten existence rustling over the sprockets of the projector and flowering there on the screen.”  His son Liam brings it to an end.  He’s impressed with the lighter:  “Wow – who gave it to you?”  Dad can only say “I’m really not sure.”

                If you’re interested in the essay as a genre, see John D’Agata’s “The Lost Origins of the Essay.”  The anthology begins with “The List of Ziusudra” and concludes with John Berger’s “What Reconciles Me.”  For D’Agata, the art of the essay is an alternative to nonfiction read for information.