Writing the Book of Life

January 23, 2016

Yesterday, I was considering my life as a whole. How do I account for almost forty years of living? What do I rank as significant in that time? Could I track each year, remember at least a little of what happened, and where? If I did, what would the sum total of it all be? Anything I would rank as an accomplishment has happened in the last decade, when I met my wife, married her and had children. Before the age of thirty, my life amounted to nothing, and nowhere. Dreams and dust.

I am always coming back to Knausgaard and Proust. Their similarities are only superficial, but they both generated massive works from the raw bedrock of their lives. I do not have that sort of material. Most of my significant interactions over the decades, it seems in retrospect, have been with dead authors. I did not have any disastrous, failed teen romances, great jealousy-riddled affairs, or disastrous first marriages. My childhood was happy, peripatetic and solitary. My mother has jokingly apologized to me for failing to provide me with traumatic author-fuel. It’s hard for me to account for my twenties, not because I was so busy enjoying youth so much as I’m not really sure I did anything at all.

Of course, this is my narrative of myself to myself, as we all tell ourselves our own stories. Self-reliance can be tricky — often we lie to ourselves more than any other person. But while the truth bends as soon as it occurs, there is one steady beam of recollection which runs unwavering through my unremarkable life: the books I have read.

The best format for my memoirs, the best imaginary framework for my life, would be an annotated reading list. Not only the books I’ve read, my memories of them, and their influences upon me, but where I read them, and when — their nesting places in the context of my history. Chapters would range from a childhood among comic books, to teenage science fiction binges, to the flowering of adulthood and my eager discoveries across the grand landscape of literature. All the while, moving from place to place, doing this or that, not really inhabiting any moment in a significant way until the moment I met my wife. I kept reading after that, of course, growing and discovering, but I was engaging in the proper stations of life as well, at last.

My life would be a strange book, lacking in characters and possessed by only the loosest plot. If there is any truth in it, by which I mean the truth of Plato and Emerson, I am likely to have glided past it at least once. If I could, I would bottle the little truths I know, seal off a thin sample of my five year old’s smile and the scent of her hair, or a slice of the midday shadow in the upper leaves of a wind-bent tree. Poetry, of a sort, but physical poetry of the world realized in a moment. Those experiences are my memoir as well, though they have little to do with me. There is meaning to it all, because we all impart meaning to our own lives — we are the sole authorities delegated to do so.

I just need to work out what that meaning is, if I can.