Word: essai
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...most personal, eccentric, and adaptable forms. "One damn thing after another," Aldous Huxley called it, "but in a sequence that in some miraculous way develops a central theme and relates it to the rest of human experience." In fact, in the annals of world literature, the unrestrained essayist (essai: attempt, trial, experiment) has always kept courageous and often dangerous company: Plato, Cicero, Carlyle, Swift, Twain, and scores of others who have helped forge our appreciation for clear thought and fresh language. Today the accomplishments of the modern essayist are no less important, and certainly no less varied and appealing...
There-this essay (from the French, essai, to try, test) has officially degenerated into a morass of egocentric affectations and Harvardian putdowns. It's the thing you've got to watch out for here. For I haven't told you about how Harvard tears you apart, because that is the part that is difficult to tell. (See John Updike's short story "The Christian Roommates" in his collection The Music School or, on a once-removed level read John Berth's The End of the Road. ) Despite, or maybe because of, our spurious elitism, we are an insecure bunch. Harvard...
With even more subtlety-for this was over her audience's head-she took a crack at racial snobbery. She referred, without elaboration, to "the Gobineaus and the Houston Chamberlains"-meaning the Comte de Gobineau (1816-82), one of the first racists, who in Essai sur I' Inégalité des Races Humaines argued that only the white races are capable of creating culture; of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1926), the fantastic Englishman who married Richard Wagner's daughter Eva, and wrote that Germany is the master race...
...Essai Surréaliste by famed Salvador Dali, showing a vast dark cypress tree rising against an evening sky from which grows a half-opened book transfixed by a peg on which droops one of Artist Dali's limp watches...
...confused with Claude Louis Berthollet (1748-1822), who made the first systematic attempt to deal with the physics of chemistry. His great book was his Essai de statique chimique...