Alduous Huxley points out three poles of reference for the various poles of essays: the “personal,” the “concrete-particular,” and the “abstract-universal” (88). He claims that each essayist tends to have one pole they are most comfortable with, and that it is rare one essay employs all three. However, Albert Goldbarth’s “Delft,” is a complex piece and employs nearly all three poles in an essay about fleas.

How he becomes interested in fleas is entirely a personal anecdote because he first encounters them on a personal level when his girlfriend’s cat becomes infested with fleas. He says, “They’ve only pestered me once in my life, and that was at Cynthia’s.” Immediately, we are introduced to the first bit of personal information about the narrator: that in college he was madly in love with a girl named Cynthia, so much, that he became obsessed with fleas after picking them off her body. “So I picked fleas off her, chasing them with a fox hunt ardor, suffering my own pink frieze of bites around the ankles as necessary dues, and thanking that near damnable cat for bringing them in” (255). Right there we have the motivation behind the various odd turns the essay takes.

The narrator then goes on to describe the sex life of fleas, or the concrete particular. On page 257 he goes into immense detail about the link between fleas and the female hormonal cycle. He discusses their ovulation, nad all of the science and biology that goes into it. At first, this seems like an irrelevant tangent, however it leads readers into the final pole Huxley was talking about and really, the larger themes of the piece as a whole. He seems to be arguing how fleas infiltrate nearly every aspect of life and are unbiased in who they pester. All this is really because of their spectacularly fast reproductive rates.

The abstract universal is the most prevalent pole in the piece because it seems to be what ties everything together. The narrator discusses art and Vermeer, facts about fleas, poetry, and Christopher Columbus just to name a few. It is the fact section where the abstract universal is really grasped, where it seems like the narrator’s intent is to show just how common fleas are. He writes, “Fact: Monkeys aren’t natural hosts to fleas…Fact: The patient pupal flea in its case will wait alive but inactive, over a year, for a proper host to appear. It knows. A realtor unlocking a house a house abandoned for months…Fact: Jesus the Christ scratched fleas” (266).

Here is a very diverse cast of characters that are seemingly unrelated, are in no way particular or concrete, or personal. The narrator leads us to this point through his personal motivations for writing this piece, and the concrete facts of flea reproduction.