essayer

I started blogging in 2011. I stopped in 2013. I was having too much fun. It was time to focus on longer pieces. But I have missed the sparks that fly when you whip up a tangible something and put it out into the world right away.

Since many years have passed, I only half remember the quirks and glitches of WordPress. Rather than shove an unannounced orphan straight onto the stage … only to learn the hard way, that, for example, a page isn’t formatted as I expected, or a link doesn’t work, or a stray icon has cropped up, I send this scout, this front runner, this try-out.

When I went hunting for a title for this opening foray, for this starter post, de-glitch occurred to me. To go right ahead to see what will go wrong. But a glitch is a malfunction in what normally occurs. And if you have only begun, there can be no glitch, not yet.

For a few hours I thought to myself maybe there is no gentle phrase for the crash and clang of Trial and Error. Then I remembered the soothing essayer from the French.

I once took a writing class with Sarah Bakewell. At the time she was at work on her book How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. The French statesman and Renaissance philosopher, she explained, invented, and then christened a new artform – the essay.

While plenty of boring discourses … “existed in Montaigne’s day, essais did not. Essayer, in French, means simply to try. To essay something is to test or taste it or give it a whirl … firing a pistol to see if it shoots straight, or trying out a horse to see if it handles well.”

To essay is to unfurl your ideas to see if they can stand up, hold water, shoot straight.

An essay – a short piece of writing.

To essay “to make an often tentative or experimental effort to perform.”

An so essayer – I launch a new blog. I dive in to test the water.

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