In his Preface to “Collected Essays,” Aldous Huxley notes that “The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist.” Those three words that he mentions are “the pole of the personal and the autobiographical,” “the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete particular,” and “the pole of the abstract-universal.”
“Delft,” an essay by Albert Goldbarth featured an imagined encounter between painter Jan Vermeer and microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, is a prime example for what Huxley refers to as one of “the most richly satisfying essays.”
Goldbarth begins his essay with an image of Leeuwenhoek lying beside his mistress – his “amorists,” an image of Leeuwenhoek’s love and private world, the world of the personal and the autobiographical, in other words. It seems like the love story involving Cynthia is somewhat a central theme of his essay as Goldbarth keeps going back to it many times after his narrations on the flea’s role in history or Leeuwenhoek’s scientific experiments.
Cynthia is also the link between his pole of the personal and the objective, as he describes her as “bevy of cupid’s helpers,” which generally a reference to insects, or fleas, in this case. On his flea hunt through erotic literature, Goldbarth keeps the objective pole in line as he throws in what seems to be factual details, “It’s not the piercing that causes the itch, but the enzymes in the flea’s saliva, which enters the wound in a forceful injection and keeps the blood from coagulating.”
The symbolic wall of fleas seems to reflects on human’s consciousness, as he writes, “The flea, which had been the final blank wall of the world became the door to a new world.” That brings us to the last pole: the abstract-universal where Cupid’s arrows turn into fleas’ bites that can only be “cured” by sexual intercourse, “Cupid is vexed when an ambrosia-lubricated convocation of deities turns sleepy under Morpheus’s intervening.”
Goldbarth’s essay seems to tell three different stories, the story of the painting of a city, the story of the fleas and the story of love, but at one point, they all intertwines into a story of life. Overall, Goldbarth’s Delft is an essay of many thought-provoking layers that “freely, effortlessly,… move in these consummate works of art, hither and thither between the essay’s three poles…” (Huxley).