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Discussion: My First Post: Just Checking
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RonPrice |
My First Post: Just Checking
Sep 13 2008, 8:16 PM EDT
I'll post an autobiographical piece relevant to the content of this site--as my first post and see how it goes.-Ron Price, Australia------------------- Autobiography, unlike novels, does not keep its readers at a distance from the facts of its author’s life. The sufferings and tribulations, the successes and wins of the autobiographer’s life are much more immediately part of the reader’s awareness than they are from a novel by the same person. The relationship between a memoir/autobiography and the reader is less mediated and more like a patient/doctor relationship. The writer is on the couch talking: the reader becomes the doctor, reading hopefully with passion and interest, listening as good doctors must, and at the same time putting the story through the mill, as any good doctor would, of his own consciousness, memory and experience. I have often wondered while I have been writing this book whether it will get any readers/doctors at all. The worst that can happen to a narrative, it is often said and as Herzen pointed out in his preface, is that it remains ‘responseless’. I have taken a course that another skeptic, David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, took at a much younger age than I. Hume writes in his autobiography that at the age of 23 he “laid that plan of life” which he “steadily and successfully pursued.” He goes on to say that he aimed “to maintain unimpaired” his independency and “to regard every object as contemptible,” except the improvements of his talents in literature.” His first literary efforts, he informs us, fell dead from the press. But, as he says, due to his naturally cheerful and sanguine temper, he very soon recovered from the blows of intellectual and social indifference which his work received. In spite of receiving no recognition he continued to prosecute “with great ardour” his studies. --testing, testing,1,2,3-- Do you find this valuable?
Keyword tags:
autobiography
consciousness
introspection
memoirs
writer.
writing
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