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45 = 3 Turning the Essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Few craft better essays today than Scott Russell Sanders, and no one more securely represents the writer as vir bonus. The voice is graceful, the man intelligent , engaged, as sympathetic as he is sympathizing. I have yet to encounter a reader unattracted to either Sanders’ humane perspectives and strongly poetic yet political sensibility or his familiar subject matter, smacking at once of Thoreau , Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry. Surely no essayist, earlier or contemporary , better suits Georg Lukács’ sense of irony as figured in essayists’ penchant for treating “the ultimate” by means of the “merely” mundane. One of our finest essayists, Scott Sanders is also one of our most acute commentators on the form. “The Singular First Person” describes more effectively than any other critical writing I know the essay’s base in individualism : it is, he writes, “a haven for the private, idiosyncratic voice in an era of anonymous babble” (190). As he acknowledges, the essayist frequently takes to the soapbox, and Sanders is unafraid to make his opinions known, reviving the spirit of Thoreau as he decries consumerism, commercialism, anonymity, insensitivity, and the decline of spiritual values. “Who Speaks on the Page?” traces his own evolution from writer of “anonymous prose” to the embrace of the subversiveness of the personal essay. In “Witnessing to a Shared World,” Sanders brings to the fore another crucial aspect of essay writing, his eye as keen as his heart is capacious: impersonal forms, such as scholarly books and news reports, writes Sanders, usually don’t emphasize the author’s own role in gathering and shaping and evaluating the material; they don’t disclose what is at stake for the one who sets down the words. By contrast, personal nonfiction calls attention to the way the material has been filtered by the writer’s consciousness, and 46 T. S. Eliot and the Essay it reveals how the tale affects the teller. Because the material of personal nonfiction is often private, known only to a few people, or perhaps only to the author alone, we may not be able to check it for accuracy against other sources, so we must take these private reports on trust if we are to take them at all. (103) To the central position of the individual, add, then, the private, even though Sanders’s interests are broad—indeed universal. His point concerning the essayist as filter is fine, returning attention to the singularity of the first-person speaking. The preface to the volume in which “The Singular First Person” is reprinted, Secrets of the Universe: Scenes from the Journey Home, adds another telling point. Sanders notes the ever-outward movement of the included essays and then writes, “The movement outward to greater and greater circles is also a movement inward, ever closer to the center from which creation springs” (x). This statement, with the pregnant copula, reminds me of Heraclitus ’ claim quoted as an epigraph to “Burnt Norton” that “[t]he way up is the way down.” Eliot does not accept the simple identity, understanding that you reach the upward path through and by means of the downward. Sanders ’s statement, though, points toward identity, not means. The implications, though subtle, are enormous, for in Sanders’s understanding, directness is not only possible but also achievable, no intermediary or mediation necessary. The collection of essays in which “Who Speaks on the Page?” and “Witnessing to a Shared World” appear, The Force of Spirit (2000), represents, as I read it, not so much a turn as a deepening of Sanders’s probing. He now comes clean and speaks directly about his religious strivings, a kind of pilgrim’s progress toward a universal spirit “flowing” through everything, which echoes, in important respects, Pound’s pagan fundamentalism. Sanders struggles here to define the power of which he is sure, well aware he may be accused of blasphemy “for speaking of the wind that blows through all things without tracing the breath to God” (15). Ultimately he finds only one word capacious enough to connote that living, enabling power: “Whatever Lord breathes upon this world of crickets and constellations blows beginnings as well as endings. The Latin word for breath is spiritus, which also means courage, air, and life. Our own word spirit carries all those overtones for me when I use it to speak of the current that lifts us into this life and bears us along and eventually lets...

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