The essay is one of the great inventions of the human mind. It can
talk about anything and everything. It can be lightsome or solemn.
It can be witty or informative. Above all, it is short. It likes
the passage in which Socrates told Callicles in the Gorgias to make
his answers brief. Yet, we can find in essays things we need and
want to know. Aquinas often managed to make the most profound
arguments in two paragraphs. Samuel Johnson did the same. The
Classical Moment is, indeed, a collection of "selected essays."
Such a collection is a classical and beloved form of English
letters, the literary form most preferred by Schall. The essays in
this book all touch on knowledge and its pleasures. Schall does not
tarry on the effort and determination it often takes to say just
what we want to say, then say it and know that we have said it.
Somehow, when an essay is written, an author simply knows that it
is complete, that it is what he wanted to say. He says to himself,
"Yes, that is it." An essayist may well be conscious that when he
begins an essay, he really does not know what he will finally say.
The writing is the saying. Our writing is our thinking, our
thinking-through, our being pleased to know this is it . . . this
is the point Schall, one of America's greatest essayists, makes
here. The "classical moment" is that intense experience of seeing
or hearing or encountering some vista, or song, or person that
takes us out of ourselves. We are most ourselves somehow when we
are most outside of ourselves, seeing what is not ourselves. We are
intended to be more than ourselves in being ourselves, to know with
others what is the truth, to know what is. These essays originally
appeared in regular columns done in various journals, papers, and
on-line sources. One can read them in any order. The order of the
author or collector does have a certain "logic," but each essay is
also a whole, something contained within itself. The unity of an
essay collection is found more in a kind enthrallment that comes to
us when we deal with the things that are both important and
delightful. At bottom, these essays belong together. Aristotle
warned us that if we did not delight in the things that are, we
would seek our highest pleasures where they are not really found.
We will always seek something to delight in. What civilization is
about lies in finding what is really worthy of the capacity of
delight that is given to us in our being. The "classical moment" is
the perfect phrase that brings us to the threshold of this
experience. We have to enter it ourselves, but once inside, we will
find so much more than ourselves. And we will rejoice.
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