This Is Us
The Last Essay
Late-night thoughts on whether life is worth living
This is a late-night essay: the kind of thoughts you have lying awake in the early morning hours; the conversations you have between midnight and last call. I want to talk to you about something that’s been on my conscience. Maybe you can help me think it through. Or not. Then we’ll finish these beers and go.
Late last night I was reflecting, as I often do these days, that life really might not be worth living after all, and I wondered whether my writing were not essentially dishonest. There’s a rough template for an essay in my mind — half-conscious, not very critically examined — not unlike the tonal arc of Romantic symphonies or the mix tapes we used to make: things may get dark and hopeless in the middle, but you leave the reader on an up note, something hopeful and life-affirming. This is true for political op-eds as well as personal essays. First the writer identifies a problem; then they propose a solution: diagnosis; cure. The latter, prescriptive sections of such op-eds are characterized by a peculiar rhetorical tic: the writer resorts to the word must, as in: “Congress must act to restore the integrity of U.S. elections,” “The President must hold Russia accountable,” or ”governments must get serious about greenhouse gas reductions” (a random sampling)…
