Years ago on New Year’s Eve, I wrote to an old friend a letter which has extractable paragraphs about my aversion to autobiographical writing, which
I want to overcome during 2022:
One reason I resisted autobiography was that I was so oriented to new experiences, new learning, always trekking on, as if looking back was infidelity to a glorious horizon.
And who would care to read the story? Everybody’s got a story...
[...]
Stories are usually for some market, which I could never care to entertain. My life, any life, is really nobody else’s concern.
People—readers, viewers—are voyeurs of others’ lives, almost pruriently seeking a godly magic of narrated access into privacies, like a camera’s eye that presciently shifts scenes—out of intimate conversations (and beds) or sudden surprises, etc., etc.—in con-
fidence about what the implicit story is to be, which its characters can’t anticipate, while the consuming viewer / reader enters into
a self-chosen time-space catered by an author—or/and production team—who wants a profit from a manageably contained world having hidden destiny that will end resolutely and coherently, contrary to most real lives.
Why not just live on without sacrificing time to look back? Love life’s horizonal emergences as much as possible—make moving on a cohering gravity, like a calling that never finishes its lovely poem.
Then die in the unsaid flow of things, like most all life does?
Ultimately anyway, we’re like the vastly unseen flowers.
