“What exactly do I mean, even, by ‘style’? Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy access of admiration, a crush. On what? The very idea. Form and texture rescued from chaos, the precision and extravagance of it, the daring, in the end the distance, such as I think I could never attain. As much in a person, in a body, as in prose: those people who can keep it together. ‘I like your style’ means: I admire, dear human, what you have clawed back from sickness and pain and madness. I’m a fan, too much a fan, of your rising above. I overestimate your power, loved writer, beloved essayist. What is it I want from you? Not quite comforting. Consolation. Is it consolation? A model of how to survive? The worst, most painful truth spoken as eloquently – or is it as strangely – as possible. The vantage it seems to me you have acquired. Of course I admire it because it seems to take you as writer, me as your reader, closer to the truth. By indirection find direction out. And so on: other clichés of the writing life. “ The problem essentially is this: I want control, and I want to let go, but neither in itself is art, and how on earth do you find a way between, a way to direct all of this ecstasy and ache? And still not lose it? (Virginia Woolf on essays: ‘Never to be yourself and yet always – that is the problem.’) Is there some combination possible of form and the formless that would achieve what I want to achieve? Is that not merely another name for compromise?”

From Essayism by Brian Dillon