It took me some time to sit with this book but once I picked it up it was impossible to stop.
I believe there's a time for this book.
Whenever you are in a period of questioning a lot of things, grab it, you won't regret it.

I enjoy essay books and taking in the different perspectives and narratives. The different themes were easy to follow and to reflect on. I enjoyed reading this collection.

On Not Knowing is a touching collection of essays written by the immensely talented Emily Ogden. I read this collection when I was personally going through a difficult time, and I felt as though Ogden's honesty was a helpful, guiding light as I worked through my own life's issues. Her writing style is uniquely frank. I appreciated how Ogden wove her own personal narrative through snippets of literary criticism and interesting references.

On Not Knowing was a refreshing take on the essay genre—each essay was perfectly paced. I didn't feel as though any idea, sentiment, or essay dragged on for longer than necessary to achieve the point. Ogden beautifully balanced the task of achieving what she wanted to say without using an entire dictionary's worth of words, or an entire catalog of references, to do so. This was really a wonderful, insightful book that I thought about long after I finished the final page.

3.5 stars

i really enjoyed this collection. many of the essays were thought-provoking and all of them were well-written. it was very easy to follow and understand which is uncommon when it comes to essay collections. anyone could read Clark's essays and understand the motif in each of them. it was also filled with literary references to things i know and love which was exciting. i had a lot of fun reading and analyzing this book.

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In a world so focused on knowing, gaining knowledge, accumulating every single piece of information available there is a liberty in not knowing, in allowing yourself the comfort and openness to now knowing. The essays explored precisely this act of admitting and allowing ourselves to simply not know.

Like some other readers, I would have liked it to be a bit more encompassing, to go a little more beyond the personal experience and elements relevant to the author's own person. A good read nonetheless

A brief, lovely collection of essays arranged as "How To"s, melding nature, motherhood, politics, storytelling, film, language, Freud, and a lot of imaginative literary references. A dip-into-and-come-up-for-air kind of book to live on the bedside table or on the shelf next to Sarah Manguso and Deborah Levy.

I think a lot about not knowing. Will I someday know — finally get it, really get it — that I don’t know? What is the point of thinking to know things, or thinking about knowledge itself, if there is nothing to be known at all? Well, it happens — the thinking, anyway.

These essays are — and of course, now, the word escapes me, I simply do not know it — gosh, what is the word for something that is small, short, brief, doesn’t take up much space or time, yet gazes off as if into another plane of being, partaking of that otherworldly depth, leaving its own borders undefined? What is that white blotch on the book’s cover: a painstakingly creased, palm-sized square of origami held in front of the eye, or a mile-high cloud beyond the control of any technology?

They are personal and philosophical essays. They are about knowing — or not knowing — when to see possibilities, when to desire, when to hope, when to listen. The answer is when we are alive, since it's hard to get more precise than that. We just don't know.

If we do not know how to live, or even whether to live, surely we do not know what is in a book, or what ought to be said about what the book has accomplished or should accomplish. And yet we do live, and we read books, and here we are.

I think that if we take time to perceive problems from a different angle, as with a poem, they may dissolve, may crystallize into something else, as with a poem, as with time. Then finally we may know, but we will no longer be who we were before, and the question will be: Who knows?

I had a real had time with this one. While reading, each essay seemed like a tour de force, with interesting references, deep criticism of literature and media, and startling scenes from parenthood. But as soon as I finished them, I couldn't remember a single thing about them. A rather odd experience as both a reader and reviewer!

On not knowing is a collection of beautiful essays on love and life by Emily Ogden.
I loved the thought-provoking yet easy to read essays written by the author.

This book is a collection of thought-provoking essays on motherhood relating to the world. Although I don't think these were essays in the traditional sense, more like observations starting from one point and building the idea, they were still interesting and I'd love to read more from this author.

"The world burns, yet the fire is not bright enough to read a map by".

As indicated by the title, an intriguing premise underpins this collection of seventeen succinct essays: the value of not knowing in approaching life and love and of engaging with the unknown. What if we would admit that in on many levels of life, we are not knowledgeable or our knowledge doesn’t answer our questions in our relationships with other creatures? 'How to love, what to do, in the dim times'? What if we would look at love, desire, parenthood, birds and cows without the ballast of our received ideas or the patterns that were ingrained into our mind by our personal history of relationships and experiences– or by simple preconception or bias? Ogden does not plead for ignorance as such – rather for looking at phenomena unburdened. For her, unknowing isn’t merely negative nor sheer absence or resignation, nor does ignorance equal bliss. In Ogden’s view, unknowing can be a state that precedes knowledge or shifts into articulating it. She engages with a kind of unknowing that is 'not the defensiveness of wilful ignorance but the defenceless of not knowing yet'. The not knowing can be a conscious-unconscious, philosophical state of exploration and openness to the experiential.

Drawing on and connecting personal experiences like the speech patterns as echoed by her twin children and the miscarriage revealing an unknown pregnancy to poetry of Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson, Ogden thematises the different forms of consciousness and of mutual ignorance of that consciousness both in the human context and in the natural world. Ogden lards her enquiry into the unknown with insights of philosophy and psycho-analysis and references to myths and the Bible, amply illustrated by quotations ranging from Baldwin, Baudelaire, Locke, Poe, Emerson, Calvino, Elisabeth Hardwick to Ovid.

The writing is beautiful and radiant and the way Ogden’s observations related to her personal life seamlessly flow into more philosophical reflections invigorates the text – in that respect the essays reminded me of the work of Karl Ove Knausgård. I however missed a more encompassing view for the collection as a whole to make it truly memorable (as well as I seem to have missed the point of some of the essays). Nevertheless the collection offered a few delicious tidbits of thought and warmed me to further reading of a few authors Ogden made me curious about (Mary Ruelfe, Anne Dufourmantelle, Elisabeth Hardwick). Her musings on Emily Dickinson, particularly on the powerful line Better an ignis fatuus/Than no illume at all gently nudged me to start Les villes de papier, an essay-novel in which Dominique Fortier tenderly brings Emily Dickinson to life.

On Not Knowing is philosophical and sometimes esoteric essay collection. While reading these essays, I found myself picturing Ogden's mind: a complex web of analytical paths. I recognized her ideas as powerful and her writing as a well-crafted artistry, but struggled to summon the required attention on my end to meet her where she was. Maybe it's the brain fatigue of a two year pandemic, or maybe the essays were just a bit out of reach for my easy engagement. I might try this book again at another time. But for now, it didn't land and take root inside me the way I wish it would have.

I really enjoyed a few of the essays within this collection, but some were a miss for me. It felt like a collection a professor might assign, if that gives you any insight.