Pico Iyer

Alas, with essays I could probably choose a hundred old favorites,
or a different every hour of the day. But on this particular blazing
autumn morning in Japan, the sun burning down out of a cloudless
blue sky onto the rusting reds and oranges and lemon-yellows of
my local park, the ones that come to me instantly include:

“Self-Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
(from Essays: First Series, 1841)

“Walking” by Henry David Thoreau
(from a lecture, 1861)

“Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard
(from Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982)

“Late Victorians” by Richard Rodriguez
(from Harper’s, October 1990)

“Speaking in Tongues” by Zadie Smith
(from The New York Review of Books, February 2009)

“On Going a Journey” by William Hazlitt
(from The New Monthly Magazine, 1822)

“The Critic as Artist” by Oscar Wilde
(from Intentions, 1891)

“Mrs Gupta Never Rang” by Jan Morris
(from City Improbable, 2005)

The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory by Derek Walcott
(published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993)

“Reflections on Writing” by Henry Miller
(from Wisdom of the Heart, 1942)

(With sincerest apologies to Donald Richie, Joan Didion, Somerset Maugham, James Wood, Thomas Merton, S.J. Perelman, Norman Mailer, Joseph Brodsky, Virginia Woolf, Woody Allen, Kenneth Tynan, Hunter Thompson, Thomas de Quincey and many others, any one of whom I would probably include in this list if you asked me again an hour from now.)