The Best Essays Of 2005

Prose endeavors to convey the meter of poetry through everyday language. Poetry by relying on meter delivers a succinct view of the world which affords the reader a prism on which to reflect on greater realities. Where poetry must appeal to the emotions, prose addresses the intellect.

The essay is the literary form most well-suited to express a specific idea or theme within a specific frame of reference. Where a book might expound a series of ideas, the essay constrains itself to concepts germane to the theme at hand. The term was coined by Michel de Montaigne to describe his 1580 collection of reflections on himself and human nature. The word essay also means 'to attempt'. It is therefore often a preliminary approach at a concept which may later be expanded into a book, if sufficient depth and interest is discerned on theme. The best essayists like Bacon, Macaulay and Emerson have the ability to make the reader appreciate the personal, objective and abstract themes addressed. As Aldous Huxley noted, "The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist".

In present times, the most common place to find a good essay is in the pages of a magazine or a newspaper. The blogosphere has also afforded aspiring writers space to express themselves in the form of what can be considered essays. In one sense, this is the Age of the Essay. Here are my nominations for the best essays I have come across this year - both in print and online.

1. Paul Graham's "Web 2.0": THe creator of the Yahoo Store may not have invented Web 2.0, but he does a masterful job of listing it's attributes: AJAX, Democracy and Don't Maltreat Users.

...Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used. The "trends" we're seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble

2. Virginia Postrel's "Consumer Vertigo"(Reason): Addressing the paradox and proliferation of choice, the essay illustrates how choice provides a large tent for the wide variety of human preferences, and how maturity lies in navigating choice, not avoiding it.

Since different people care intensely about different things, only a society where choice is abundant everywhere can truly accommodate the variety of human beings. Abundant choice doesn’t force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.

3. Wired's "10 Years That Changed the World": In his new book "The Next Global Stage", Kenichi Ohmae says the world changed in 1985. Thomas Friedman expresses similar thoughts in "The World Is Flat". Wired Magazine took a look at the years since 1985, when Netscape went public, a time they term "A Decade of Genius And Madness". A host of interviews with the icons of the new Pantheon. Kevin Kelly notes,

Why aren't we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone's scenario. Ten years ago, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn't enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was impossible.

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Article Author: Aaman Lamba

Aaman Lamba is a Blogcritics editor, as well as the Publisher of Desicritics.org, a Blogcritics network site covering media, politics, culture, sports and more with a global South Asian focus

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