He's so respectable

(In which I promise to avoid the phrase “ancient art of weaving.”)

Essayist Phillip Lopate champions self-skepticism as a crucial element in writing. From E.M. Cioran, Lopate borrowed the term “thinking against oneself,” something that he acknowledged to Melissa Giannini is “a powerful part of the [essay] form. That you don’t just assert; you think, ‘yes, but,’ or ‘okay, okay, we know that. What is there to be said against it?’” I think I know the answer to the question I’ve posed in my subtitle....