"The accepted translation of 'essay' as 'attempt' contains only vaguely the essential allusion to the literary model, for an essay is not a provisional or incidental expression of a conviction capable of being elevated to a truth under more favourable circumstances or of being exposed as an error (the only ones of that kind are those articles or treatises, chips from the scholar's workbench, with which the learned entertain their special public); an essay is rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man's inner life in a decisive thought.
[...]
There have been more than a few such essayists, masters of the inner hovering life, but there would be no point in naming them. Their domain lies between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between
amor intellectualis and poetry; they are saints with and without religion, and sometimes they are also simply men on an adventure who have gone astray."
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities p273.
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