– Securing the terrain
An essay often begins with a claim that feels too sharp, too certain, too easily said.
Something like:
Every generation thinks the world is getting worse.
A sentence that appears to know exactly what it means. A sentence that arrives fully formed, carrying with it assumptions, memories, frustrations and half-forgotten experiences. A sentence that invites agreement, disagreement, or dismissal before we’ve even considered what might be concealed inside it.
Irish writers have always understood this tension. Myles na gCopaleen could puncture a confident claim with a single twist of satire; Joyce could unravel it into the private machinery of thought. Hubert Butler – the writer to whom I perhaps feel closest – examined received wisdom with a quiet, forensic clarity that left little room for cant.
They understood that a position becomes interesting only when you begin to test it. That’s where the essay starts.
To essay is to attempt: to take a statement and follow its logic, not to inflame or reassure, but to understand what lies beneath it. Where did the idea come from? What fear or experience or assumption gives it shape? What happens when we press on it, turn it around, or look at it from another angle?
The essay is not where opinions go to be confirmed. It’s where they go to be examined.
Butler did this with history. O’Nolan did it with absurdity. Joyce did it with consciousness. Their subjects differed, but they shared a willingness to follow a thought beyond its slogans and certainties, into more difficult and interesting territory. That’s the work that interests me here. Not slogans. Not certainties. Not the performance of conviction for its own sake.
Rather, the attempt to think through the things we say – especially the things we say too quickly. An essay is a way of slowing down a thought long enough to see what it’s made of. This site is where I’ll try to do that…
To take a position, hold it up to the light, and see what remains.
Sometimes the position will survive the examination.
Sometimes it won’t.
The value lies in the examination itself.
David Marshall
30 January 2026
Skerries
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