A True Autobiography
"No “meta-theory” could be manufactured to make it all consistent and understandable. That is quintessentially human, and timeless."
Try to imagine a computational model of your reading life, a visual representation of every book you ever read, reread, started but didn’t finish or lied about having read. The result would be more complicated, denser with connections, than your family tree, something approximating a shelf or two in Borges’ “Library of Babel.” It might resemble a truer autobiography than a mere recitation of events. More importantly, few conclusions could be drawn from the results. No “meta-theory” could be manufactured to make it all consistent and understandable. That is quintessentially human, and timeless.
I recommend Patrick’s blog. His consistency in posting daily inspired me to start this very Substack. I can only hope this newsletter may eventually become “a visual representation of every book [I] ever read, reread, started but didn’t finish or lied about having read”.
Patrick’s comments on the “quintessentially human” inconsistency of the canon articulate what I meant to convey in my post on Chekhov’s ambiguity, and what I think China Miéville was hinting at in his praise of Tolkien; that indefiniteness, if properly measured out, makes art more human.