Autobiographical Ruminations

More from Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker:

“But the writing of autobiography is a dangerous business; it is a mark either of great insensitiveness to danger or of an almost supernatural courage.  Nobody but a god can pass unscathed through the searching ordeal of incarnation.”

[Background:  Sayers is using that observation as the conclusion of a chapter discussing of the writing of autobiography, a particular form of art which has obvious relevance to a rather noteworthy Creative Act of God.  What follows is not directly related to what Sayers is arguing, so I suppose this isn’t really background after all.  Relabel it as: Pointless Digression.]

After reading Sayers’ chapter on autobiography, I got to ruminating about my own life (shocking) and once again faced the realization that a biography of my life would be pretty dull stuff.  When I have said this to people in the past, there is almost always an immediate objection.  It seems that saying one’s life would make a dull biography is taken as a strong version of self-deprecation.  There is apparently rampant confusion of the two sentences: 1) “My biography would be dull” and 2) “My life is worthless.”  But, those two sentences are not even remotely the same.  My life is not worthless, yet I have a hard time imagining anyone wanting to read a book-length treatment of it.  I was born, grew up, went to school, got married, got a job, had kids.  Nothing exciting there.  So, I cannot even imagine writing an autobiography, which made me wonder about whether Sayers’ remarks quoted above were accurate or not.  How would I know?

Then it hit me.  I’ve been writing this here blog for a few years now.  This blog has no real content other than a Faithful Record of My Thoughts over Time.  Which strangely sounds a lot like autobiography.  Have I been writing an autobiography for the last few years without even knowing it?  The mind reels.

If so, which is it:  do I have an insensitivity (Sayers’ “insensitiveness” is a rather ugly word, no?) to danger or a supernatural courage?  Clearly the former—despite all evidence to the contrary, I still write up these ruminations with pretense that nobody is actually reading this blog.  Then again, there really isn’t much of a danger here—after all, I am a tenured professor.  (Janet is constantly worried that my blog will somehow lead to some dire result, but when pressed, she can never actually figure out what could actually happen to me if someone (who?) took offense.  Janet has neither an insensitivity to danger nor supernatural courage—and perhaps not coincidentally, she doesn’t write autobiography.  More from Janet anon.)

Pursuing the Blog as Autobiography line a bit further:  is this blog an honest autobiography?  As Sayers notes, no autobiography can be the whole of the author, it is inherently a partial revelation due to the limitation of the form.  Obviously I am more than my blog (and as Hannah constantly reminds me, I am certainly more than the title of my blog).  But, if we imagine handing the last few years of blog entries to a person who knew nothing about me, would the impression formed from nothing other than what was written in this place bear any resemblance to Reality?  What strange creature would be conjured up by the contents herein?  That is one of those questions which would generate an answer which it is probably better not to know.  Yet , it is also one of those questions that once asked, makes one wonder.

And then:  if this blog is a form of autobiography, then perhaps my autobiography isn’t as dull as I would have thought.  (Please, Dear Reader, bear with the line of reasoning a bit and avoid the Obvious Retort.)  While my conventional biography would be quite dull, I have read some Great Books and had some Great Conversations over the years, and a record of those books and conversations is potentially not Without Interest.  (Again, Dear Reader, imagine a Competent Scribe and you can at least imagine the possibility.)  And suddenly I realized that the most famous biography of all time details a life in which absolutely nothing happens—one reads Boswell to see Johnson’s wit, not his activities.

At this stage in my ruminations, I broached the subject at the dinner table last night.  Lo and behold, Janet was channeling Samuel Johnson.  She quickly concluded that blogs were akin to autobiography.  However she added that blogs were much worse than autobiography.  Traditional autobiography required that the contents pass muster with an editor before they were broadcast to the world.  Blogs have no such editor.  These days, anybody can feel free to broadcast his life and thoughts to the world, whether such writing is worthy of attention or not (and for some reason, Janet looked at Your Humble Narrator with a knowing glance when mentioning the latter option).  Insensitive to the danger (see above), I then asked why people would feel the need to write an autobiography.  “Narcissism.”  Janet didn’t miss a beat in giving that answer.  Blogging is the ultimate form of narcissism, concluded Janet.  One assumes that  one’s every thought is worthy of attention and so one blogs.  Moreover, my Long-Suffering Wife added, to write with a complete lack of concern for the Reader, to write simply for one’s own amusement and yet post such writings in a public forum, is the Supreme Form of Narcissism. 

Apparently my wife thinks I am a Narcissist.