Perhaps what disappeared with the familiar essay was not merely a form, not merely even an attitude, but a whole subject matter. For the familiar essay affords what is probably the bets method of discussing those subjects which are neither obviously momentous nor merely silly. And, since no really good life is composed exclusively of problems and farce, either the reading of most people today does not actually concern itself with some of the most important aspects of their lives or those lives are impoverished to a degree which the members of any really civilized society would find it difficult to understand. Just as genuine conversation—by which I mean something distinguishable from disputation, lamentation, and joke-telling—has tended to disappear from social gatherings, so anything comparable to it has tended to disappear from the printed page. — Joseph Wood Krutch, If You Don’t Mind My Saying So: Essays on Man and Nature In a postcard to his friend Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche…
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