The Davies Group, PO Box 440140, Aurora, Colorado 80044-0140.
Essayists are a rare breed nowadays.
In these frenetic times the more deliberative arts seem to have given way to unpunctuated email, the mobile phone and the fax. Our communication is unplanned, unconsidered. It is as though we have valued spontaneity to the point where it is the only worthwhile currency, abandoning the shillings and pence of solitary meditation with unseemly haste. Our newspapers are full of impressions, soundbites and comments. Yet, wherever a proper understanding is sought, it must be to the essayist, the historian, the philosopher that we turn.