On Not Knowing
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Moments of clarity are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty within which we make our lives? Written by critic Emily Ogden while her children were small, On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space. Each of her sharply observed essays invites the reader to think with her about questions she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love.
Unapologetically capacious in her range of reference and idiosyncratic in the canon she draws on, Ogden moves nimbly among the registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Committed to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness for her can be a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. Rather than the defensiveness of wilful ignorance, On Not Knowing celebrates the defencelessness of not knowing yet - which, Ogden suggests, may be a form of love.
Emily Ogden's writing has appeared in The Yale Review, Critical Inquiry, The New York Times, American Literature, the LA Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and Berfrois, among other publications. Her new book about the perils and possibilities of ignorance, On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays, is published by University of Chicago Press and Peninsula Press.