The Best American Essays 2014 Read Online Free PDF

spans the English channel. It assumes many two-sided forms: trial/try, high/low, literature/journalism, formal/familiar, French/English, Eyquem/Ockham. The vital thing is that the vibration itself be there. Without it you have no “essays,” you have only the
Essais.
To edit this anthology, I looked first for pieces in which the field was strong.
    James was sitting there. It was January of 1610. Donne and Bacon and Joseph Hall and the rest of the gang were in the audience too—they may have been, so let’s say they were. And the boys were performing Jonson’s
Epicœne.
It’s a lad who is playing, for the first time, the role of Sir John Daw, a knight. John Daw = Jack Daw = jackdaw, a bird that, like a magpie, likes to pick up and collect shiny things, such as classical quotations. Jack Daw may be a satirical representation of Bacon himself—more than one scholar has wondered. In the story, he has just been forced (it doesn’t take much forcing) to recite some of his work. The work is ludicrous. But his listeners, meaning by flattery to draw him into further clownishness, tell him that it possesses “something in’t like rare wit and sense.” Indeed, they say—sounding already like us, when we go on about the essay’s origins—“’tis Seneca . . . ’tis Plutarch.”
    Jack Daw, in the silliness of his vanity, takes the comparison as an insult. “I wonder,” he says, that “those fellows have such credit with gentlemen!”
    â€œThey are very grave authors,” his little crowd assures him.
    â€œGrave asses!” he says. “Meere essayists, a few loose sentences and that’s all.”
    Essayists: that’s when it enters the world, with that line. The first thing we notice: that the word is used derisively and dismissively. And yet the character using it is one toward whom we’re meant to feel derisive and dismissive. A pretentious ass. Who may be jibingly based on the inventor of the essay, Francis Bacon. On top of everything, the moment transpires before the eyes of the very monarch who had imported the word in the first place, initiating this long dialogue, and who is himself irretrievably but undoubtedly implicated somehow in the nesting doll of Jonson’s wit.
    How could we possibly trust any creature that comes into the world wearing such a caul of ambiguity? That’s “essayists.” Four hundred and four years later, they continue—as it was my privilege to find in editing this anthology—to flourish.
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    J OHN J EREMIAH S ULLIVAN

TIMOTHY AUBRY
A Matter of Life and Death
    FROM
The Point
    Â 
Now you become my boredom and my failure,
Another way of suffering, a risk . . .
—Philip Larkin
    Â 
    O FTEN AT NIGHT I dream that I’ve found some dangerous object lying on the floor and swallowed it. I sit up, coughing violently, trying to force it back out. I turn to my wife and tell her that I’ve ingested something potentially fatal, and what should I do? If she wakes up grouchy, she snaps, “Be quiet! I’m trying to sleep!” Startled, I recover myself, realize it’s just the same nightmare I always have, and feel acutely embarrassed, hoping my wife won’t remember the interruption the next morning. Other times she rubs my arm and says gently, “It’s okay. You’re fine. You didn’t swallow anything. Go back to sleep, babe.” The next morning she asks me, “How do you even know I’m there? I mean, aren’t you dreaming? Why do you have to get me involved?”
    Being left alone in my room in the dark used to be the scariest part of my life. I’ve been having night terrors as long as I can remember. At a pretty young age, I figured out that monsters hiding under the bed or even regular human intruders did not pose the greatest threat to my existence, and having seen a few too many episodes of Michael