The Silver Age of Essays

You can’t claim a silver or golden age of anything while you’re living in it. If you do, it’s pure marketing copy.

“Much the way journalism has increasingly surrendered its claims of objective neutrality and allowed reporters room for subjective voice, so the essay has come to rely more and more on an “I.” With that has come an infusion of raw honesty, vulnerability, and awkward admission such as would scarcely have been seen in earlier essays. Younger essayists are often willing to acknowledge confusion, psychological distress, thralldom to contradictory drives and uncontrollable desires. There is often a trade-off: more heat, urgency, diaristic excitement, less perspective.”

This sounds like the cultural dead-end the visual arts entered in the late 20th Century. Passing off personal psychological or social pathology as deep, or entertaining, insights. Titillating as social or class pornography by those privileged enough to simply look at it from the printed page. A bore and a waste for anyone else.

Therapists get paid good money to listen to/read such dribble, with the hope of a better day for someone at the end. No such saving grace here.