A juicy, crisp flash essay, or a very short essay, goes great with your toast and eggs in the morning. Or perhaps you’re more of an after-dinner reader, curled up in an armchair with a full belly and a book. Either way, these three brief flash essays from 1572, 1941, and 2008—each only about two pages—might give you a taste for creative nonfiction and inspiration for your own writing.
 
 
Michel de Montaigne’s “On Fear” (1572) 
 
This speculative essay on the grand subject starts with humility, as Montaigne admits that he doesn’t in fact quite understand how fear affects us. He then explores fear alongside his readers, writing out the questions that we’re all thinking.
 
Montaigne describes and analyzes many events when fear took over the bodies and minds of everyone from the bravest humans in history to ordinary passerbys, only to end in deadly consequences. In 1527 an ensign’s frightened mistake with a flag led to Sir Charles of Bourbon laying siege to Rome. During the siege, a man died from pure fear before even engaging in combat, and Emperor Theophilos’ main officer had to drag him from death when he froze in front of his enemy mid-battle. Ten thousand Roman infantrymen threw themselves into battle when they had nowhere else to go, and Pompey’s allies erupted into screams as they watched the bloody battle unfold.
 
Montaigne explores the different responses to fear, from fight to flight to freeze, insightful psychological observations for his time. His use of quotes about fear in Latin emphasizes how core fear is to the human experience, as fear has been discussed since ancient times.
 
He ends the essay introducing an unreachable category of fear that plagued the Ancient Greeks, called “panic terrors.” Montaigne never elaborates, leaving readers scared of the ending of that untold story, just a fraction of all the horrors in human history are left unrecorded.
 
 
Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” (1941)
 
This nonfiction narrative essay is the most descriptive of the three. Although it reads like dramatized fiction, it portrays a real moment in Woolf’s life where she observes a moth fluttering against a windowpane. As the scene unfolds, she ponders the fleeting nature of life until the moth falls to the window ledge for one final twitch.
 
With detailed imagery of the ordinary and mundane, Woolf creates a sense of how small the moth is in the author’s world. Marvelous and pathetic, it hits the window pane over and over, flying the best that it can. Woolf masterfully creates a melancholy atmosphere that stuck with me long after I put down the essay.
 
By the end of the piece, you can’t help but wonder if the author saw herself in the moth. Small, beautiful, pitiful, trapped in an endless cycle, and finally released from a strange life through a strange death.
 
 
Sarah Manguso’s “The Cure” (2008)
 
This brief essay tells the story of how sex cured the college-aged author’s disease. Truly, it is a story of the healing power of feeling beautiful.
 
The story jumps between cold medical descriptions of dialysis and even colder descriptions of sex. Manguso didn’t want love; she was a 20-something woman on a mission to have sex once more before she died of her blood disease. Her language is simple and direct, her bodily goals outlined on an invisible contract between her and the young medical student she hooks up with.
 
Later, her writing voice softens when she describes the real intimacy: him seeing her scarred and scabbed body and still choosing to hold her.

Manguso is a master of concise writing, and every sentence in “The Cure” hits hard. I left this piece feeling connected to her younger, college-aged self, as a college student myself figuring out self worth and inner beauty.
 
 
Despite the five century range, these three personal essays all offer timeless truths about life in nonfiction storytelling. They are devoted to capturing the “aboutness” of fear, death, and self-worth. If you’re looking for humble, candid storytelling set in our real world, you should read these three works by Montaigne, Woolf, and Manguso this week.