Perry Link once noticed that Chinese writers use more verbs in their sentences whereas English writers use more nouns.

For example, in one passage from the18th-century Chinese novel “Dream ofthe Red Chamber,” Cao Xueqin uses 130nouns and 166 verbs. In a similar passagefrom “Oliver Twist,” Charles Dickensuses 96 nouns and 38 verbs.

This observation is at the core of hisNew York Review of Books essay “TheMind: Less Puzzling in Chinese?” whichis the first winner of this year’s SidneyAwards. I give out the awards, named forthe philosopher Sidney Hook, to celebratesome of the best long-form essays of eachyear.

Li n k n ot e s t h a t I n d o -Eu r o p e a nlanguages tend to use nouns even whenverbs might be more appropriate. Thinkof the economic concept inf lation. Wedescribe it as a thing we can combat, orwhip or fight. But it’s really a process.

Lin k t akes thi s thought i n a ver yphilosophical direction, but it set mewondering how much our thinking ismuddled because we describe actionsas things. For example, we say someonehas knowledge, happiness or faith (a lotof faith or a little faith, a strong faith ora weak faith); but faith, knowledge andhappiness are activities, not objects.

If that last point needed underlining,go to Christian Wiman’s beautiful essay“I Will Love You in the Summertime,” inThe American Scholar. As a small child,Wiman used to sneak into his parents’room in the middle of the night and peelopen their eyelids in the hopes that hecould see what they were dreaming.

But the essay is mostly about the thingschildren know, the things adults knowand the process of reaching beyondeveryday perception. It’s better to quote afew passages:“People who have been away f romGod tend to come back by one of twoways: dest it ut ion or abundance, anovermaster ing sor row or a st rangelydisabling joy. Either the world is notenough for the hole that has opened inyou, or it is too much.”“I suggested she pray to God. This waseither a moment of tremendous grace orbrazen hypocrisy (not that the two can’tcoincide), since I am not a great pray-ermyself and tend to be either underminedby irony or overwhelmed by my ownchaotic consciousness.”“As for myself, I have found faith notto be a comfort but a provocation to a lifeI never seem to live up to, an eruption ofjoy that evaporates the instant I recognizeit as such, an agony of absence thatassaults me like a psychic wound. As formy children, I would like them to be freeof whatever particular kink there is in methat turns every spiritual impulse intoanguish.”Wiman also nicely quotes the Jewishtheologian Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Iasked for wonders instead of happiness,Lord, and you gave them to me.”These two essays are not about theevents that shook the world in 2016. I’llget to more of them in the next batch ofSidneys, but in the meantime, the mostimportant — and best crafted — essay ofthe year was probably Jeffrey Goldberg’s“The Obama Doctrine” in The Atlantic.

It’s a classic not only on Barack Obama’smind and the world situat ion today,but also about the act of foreign policymaking.

Nathan Heller’s “Letter from Oberlin:The Big Uneasy,” in The New Yorker,captured the moral awakening (or mania)that is sweeping col lege campuses.

That essay, too, generated an enormousamount of conversation and is wor threvisiting.

I’ll end this batch of Sidneys withanother percept ion-alter ing essay,Charles Foster’s “In Which I Tr y toBecome a Swift,” from Nautilus. Fosterwrites about swifts, a family of birds a bitlike swallows.

Swi f t s a re v iolent , acrobat ic andethereal. They eat 5,000 or more insects aday. When they hunt for bees they selectonly the stingless ones. They can selectthe wasp mimics from actual wasps, evenwhile traveling 50 feet a second.

But the essay is really about Foster’s efforts to enter into the swift experience. Once while driving to a day care center, he saw a group of them exploding from some tree tops. He scrambled up a tree, where “I swayedin a fork just below the top and pushed my head out into the killing zone of the delta. I saw a tongue, squat, gray,and d r y; I saw myself, pinched and saucer-eyed. … I snapped a mouthful of nymphs and spat them onto the roof of a brand new Mercedes dropping off a child from a house 300 yards away. It was the closest I ever got.”Foster enters into the different ways swifts experience air and time, and like all these writers, undercuts the normal way we see the world.

More winners are coming Friday. If you want essays like this all year, I have to again recommend the website The Browser, edited by Robert Cottrell, which gathers eloquence from far and wide day after day.


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