Tether.

Eliza Gabbert lays the groundwork for looking at the essay as realm ...

I think this is important: memories and ideas happen in a place. An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place. It has to give one the feeling of entering a room. 

The architect Christopher Alexander has written that “the experience of entering a building influences the way you feel inside the building.” “If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival.” He cites a report called “Fairs, Exhibits, Pavilions, and their Audiences,” in which the authors describe observing people drift in and out of various exhibits, impassive and unengaged. There was one exhibit, however, where visitors had to cross a “huge, deep-pile, bright orange carpet on the way in.” The exhibit itself was no better than the others, they said, but people lingered there because they’d made a journey of sorts to enter. They’d crossed a kind of Willy Wonka or Wizard of Oz threshold, into a different realm. They felt changed. 

Another experiment showed people judge houses with greater degrees of transition between inside and outside to be more “houselike.” If there is a courtyard or a partially hidden garden or a curving pathway to the front entrance, the house exhibits more “houseness.” The transitional space makes room for a shift in mood, for what Alexander calls “ambiguous territories” and “intimacy gradients”—increasing degrees of closeness, as you reach the inner realm. The vogue for conversation pits exploited this phenomenon. The act of descending, getting closer to the earth, is metaphysical; it changes how you speak and think. It is literally profound.

Later ...

My favorite museums are house museums, like the Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, or Peggy Guggenheim’s house in Venice, repurposed spaces with multiple paths through, plenty of nooks and intimacy gradients, rooms with lots of light and plants that feel like the outdoors, or outdoor spaces with partial walls and ceilings that feel like rooms. The space of the essay does have edges, but the edges are a little bit ragged and open. As you start to explore the territory, it’s like you’re tethered to a tree in the courtyard, but the tether can be rather long. The tree is the idea you’re building your house or your essay around. You can wander rather far from the original tree, but only so far. Your reader can feel the tether too. It is sometimes slack and sometimes taut. The variance in tension is pleasurable. You want the tether to get very taut sometimes—you have wandered very far from the tree.

We call attention to the tether whenever we make a transition. Think of an essay in very short sections or fragments. Each break yanks the tether, as if the tree is calling you back. This effect can be very intentional, as in Mary-Kim Arnold’s book-length essay, Litany for the Long Moment, which uses as its structural scaffolding the questionnaire from a Korean tv show that reunites separated families. There’s poignancy to the pull of the tether each time we return to a question. “who are you looking for?” this book asks itself several times, attempting to answer and then asking again. “when do you miss your mother or family the most?” “did you ever face any difficulty in your life and how did you overcome it? please explain in detail.” Again: “who are you looking for?” again: “how did you overcome it?” The book ends with three attempts at Question 14: “write a letter to your mother.” In parentheses: “(a long letter.)” The first attempt is half a page. The question repeats. The second is a little longer. The question repeats. The third is the longest. The stop of the tether each time we read the question, the choke of it, forces us to feel the difficulty in the material for the writer. When the structure is apparent, the reader and the writer are in the same place.