The lost origins of the essay

The list of Ziusudra / Ziusudra of Sumer

Dialogue of pessimism / Ennatum of Akkad

I have looked diligently at my own mind / Heraclitus of Ephesus

These are them / Theophrastus of Eressos

Some information about the Spartans / Mestrius Plutarch

Sick / Lucius Seneca

Questions and answers / Azwinaki Tshipala

The biography of Mr. Five-Willows / T'ao Ch'ien

Is there a God? / Li Tsung-Yuan

Miscellany / Li Shang-yin

The pillow book / Sei Shōnagon

In all things I yearn for the past / Yoshida Kenkō

My journey up the mountain / Francesco Petrarch

Definitions of earthly things / Bernardino de Sahagún

On some verses of Virgil / Michel de Montaigne

Antitheses of things / Francis Bacon

Hydriotaphia, urn burial ; or, A discourse of the sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk / Thomas Browne

Narrow road to the interior / Matsuo Bashō

A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public / Jonathan Swift

My cat Jeoffry / Christopher Smart

The marriage of heaven and hell / William Blake

The English mail-coach / Thomas De Qunicey

Ondine / Aloysius Bertrand

Be drunk / Charles Baudelaire

A season in hell / Arthur Rimbaud

A throw of the dice will never abolish chance / Stéphane Mallarmé

The I-singer of universong / Velimir Khlebinikov

The night / Dino Campana

Anabasis / Saint-John Perse

Eighteen seconds / Antonin Artaud

Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity / Fernando Pessoa

The death of the moth / Virginia Woolf

Conversation in the mountains / Paul Celan

The pebble / Francis Ponge

Dread of one single end / Edmond Jabès

Tisanes / Ana Hatherly

Before sleep / Octavio Paz

Fires / Marguerite Yourcenar

Tlön, Uqbar, orbis tertius / Jorge Luis Borges

The instruction manual / Julio Cortázar

The egg and the chicken / Clarice Lispector

Egypt / Michel Butor

He and I / Natalia Ginzburg

Trench Town rock / Kamau Braithwaite

Suggestions for running amok / Peter Handke

The Atlantic man / Marguerite Duras

Afar a bird / Samuel Beckett

Seven walks / Lisa Robertson

What reconciles me / John Berger.