"The Secrets Inside Us"

The piece of that title by Bill Hayes on today’s Op-Ed page is a perfect “essay in disguise.”

A few years ago the New York Times ran an ad campaign called “My Times” – calling attention to the different things the paper is to different people.

Well, “my” Times is a place for essays in disguise.

The term was coined by Wilfrid Sheed, who died in 2011 and didn’t get a properly appreciative send-off, as far as I know. Sheed’s work as a writer, he explained in the preface to a book of essays, consisted of taking assignments for book reviews, profiles, travel pieces, and the like and turning them into “essays in disguise” – and so getting paid to produce pieces of writing he would have been happy to write in any circumstances.

Just as the writer who is temperamentally an essayist is always on the hunt for the opportunity to work up an essay, so the reader who is drawn to essays is always on the lookout for a piece of journalism that is an essay in disguise — or that seems to have turned into an essay as the writer gained access to the combination of curiosity and formal freedom that characterizes the essay (I was going to say “the essay form,” but caught myself: what makes it an essay is its relative freedom from form).

So I keep an eye out. My mentor Verlyn Klinkenborg’s piece about the decline and fall of the English major was an essay in disguise. So was Ben Ratliff’s piece (just yesterday) on the strange kinship of Boston and Black Flag. And so is Hayes’s piece, in which he takes the strange news that a scientists have just “discovered” a new part of the body (it’s in the knee) and up and runs with it – through the story of the Renaissance anatomist Vesalius, his own spell in an anatomy class, and the never-ending mystery of “the secrets inside us”:

Continuing studies will further clarify the ligament’s biomechanical function, and whether there are clinical implications.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can be our own Vesalius and discover this newly, precisely described body part on our own: Put a hand to the outside of one knee, right at the ledge of the shallow pit next to your kneecap. Extend, bend, stand, crouch, twist. All the while, picture this: right beneath your fingers is a pearly piece of tissue, about an inch-and-a-half long, helping to make all of this happen.

Now, take a step. Take a moment. Appreciate it.

There is a near constant call for the resuscitation of the frankly literary essay, but I prefer my essays disguised.

That’s Truman Capote — another stealth essayist — behind the mask.

• 4 December 2013