On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays

A beautifully written suite of personal essays on the value of not knowing.

Moments of clarity and revelation are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty and irresolution within which we make our lives? Amid the drudgery of daily responsibilities and under a cloud of political foreboding, there’s beauty in errancy, in meandering, in tracking perception’s bright thread without knowing where it leads. Written by English professor Emily Ogden while her children were small, On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space. Each of her brief, 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; from kayaking near a whale to a psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. 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 willful ignorance, On Not Knowing celebrates the defenselessness of not knowing yet-possibly of not knowing ever. Ultimately, this book shows, beautifully, how resisting the temptation of knowingness and embracing the position of not knowing becomes a form of love.