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Page 11 January–February 2008 One way to consider an essayist’s work is to ask oneself what it would be like to have that essayist , or at least his or her persona in writing, as a talkative seatmate on a cross-country flight. The contents of journals, great and small, and booklength memoirs of varying degrees of veracity, suggest that this thought experiment might in many cases yield frightening results. They would include, but are by no means limited to, an accumulation of minutia redeemed by neither context nor reflection; a leapfrogging over several levels of familiarity to the unwanted intimacy that has acquired the acronym of TMI (too much information); and the presentation of unresolved if not unassimilated trauma that calls for professional help rather than a dispersed support group of readers. Underlying these details would be found an alarming dearth of humor and a degree of self-absorption that is socially acceptable only on the part of celebrities. The late Spaulding Gray, apparently born without ego boundaries in the way that others are born without color vision, could get away with so often making the subject of his sentences “I” because the personal pronoun became at last archetypal and transparent. Most writers’ strengths lie elsewhere, and they owe it to themselves as well as their readers to do the hard work of finding and developing those strengths. One of the writers who has taken up this task is Lia Purpura. Freed from the mirror, the author’s gaze can find any number of suitable objects. The eighteen essays of varying length in her collection On Looking present a quietly assured sensibility that does not ignore the writer’s self in order to achieve an Augustan loftiness or Olympian condescension, but rather places that self in context as only one of the world’s ten thousand things. The book’s eponymous premise, a capacious vessel given how heavily our species depends on the sense of sight, shows a self that is modest and relational, offering confidences only to the extent that they further the essay’s larger objectives. In “OnAesthetics,” for instance, she notes, “I live these days at a crouch.”A lesser writer might take these words as the premise of an entire medical memoir, with its implicit claims on the reader’s sympathy, but Purpura moves on, “I found a four-leaf clover. I wasn’t searching. Nor was I hoping. It was a big one, the size of a quarter, with a shirring of very light, almost white rick-rack along the edge of each. The clover was heavy and moist with dew, the stem a beautifully taut little straw of lighter translucent green.” The writer’s priorities are evident. Elsewhere she mentions surgeries, and a hospital roommate with scoliosis, but her own condition goes discreetly unnamed. There is no need to know. Freed from the mirror, the author’s gaze can find any number of suitable objects. In “Sugar Eggs: AReverie,” one of several collage essays, the subject becomes a kind of Borgesian aleph. The scenes they enclose suggest other miniature worlds portrayed in the stereopticon, View-Master, and snow globe, and their properties bring to mind the delicate structure of jellyfish, the crystal hollows of geodes, and the enclosures of amber. Both aesthetic distance and the necessity of focus are invoked. Such an essay can hardly reach the resolution of a linear argument. Instead, it traces the contours and implications of its topic, so that the appeal of looking into a sugar egg can be understood as “A way of being sealed away, destiny-less, in a sanctuary with no purpose at all, save being led.Away of being a child reading under a sheet with a flashlight. Half-moon shadows on the page.” Yet, Purpura reminds us that aesthetics represents only one aspect of looking. Its ethical dimension cannot be avoided. “The Smallest Woman in the World” plumbs the combination of voyeuristic curiosity and unease, if not guilt, inherent in looking at what a less tactful time would have called a sideshow freak. Seeing that person as a means of entertainment rather than an end in his or herself raises some of...

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