Quotables: The Missing Piece

“To essay is to attempt, to puzzle out, to look for the missing piece, to not necessarily find it, to carry on in putting back together what is looked for and maybe not found, to be the biographer of a thought or the cartographer of cognition, to associate things not normally associated. The essay’s plot is contrived of mapping the synapses firing in the brain to produce idea. The speaker is called a narrator, who, when wearing a disguise, is called a persona. The essayist is the ultimate mad scientist, abandoning hypothesis and thesis to collect and distill a drop of consciousness. In the end, all we can do is try to assemble pieces of a story, and tell it, bit by bit.”

~ Kim Dana Kupperman, On “71 Fragments for a Chronology of Possibility”: An Eight-Fragment, Five-Paragraph Essay in Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction