Dear Geist,

If you aren’t tired of answering questions about writing essays, can you give our not-yet-professional but serious writing club a concise definition?

—Anania, Koa and Lilith, working from home

Dear all,

By this time we reckon there are as many essays as there are illuminations and explanations about essays, and we love them all. May the same fate befall you! And because you haven’t locked anything in, we’ll gladly recommend a paper by the writer Michael Hamburger, who died in 1975. Rather than attempting to define the purpose of essays, or any particular essay, Hamburger started with the title: “An Essay on the Essay.” But then, he wrote: “Even that isn’t quite right: an essay ought not to be on anything, to define anything. An essay is a walk, an excursion, not a business trip.”

In that wonderful passage, Hamburger frees the essay and the essayist, so that we can look, listen and breathe in, rather than struggle dutifully to pull something out of ourselves that isn’t what we really want to know, or say.

—The Editors