Looking at what you've just done, the critics ask what's in it for them, for their immediate entertainment or information; and maybe -- maybe -- what's in it for their moment.
The historians will ask how it continues what you've done before, and how it fits into your era.
But you, why have you done it?
2 comments:
I'm reading another Gay autobiography presently, Edmund White's City Boy. (That was also the title of one of Herman Wouk's earliest novels.)
In my thirties, I read Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind.
Both books confront the phenomena of looking at oneself through older eyes, and trying to "live through" the act of choosing and judging from both points of view simultaneously--something Capote succeeded at in In Cold Blood, where (as the central character wandering around Holcomb, Kanses for five years) nothing was more strange, and fascinating than his own self--though in the story he writes, he's almost invisible--which, of course, is precisely how journalism is supposed to be done--even the "new" journalism. You are the invisible center of the action around you, filtering and sifting it into a manageable narrative.
In your post above, there's the line "while the eternal generation of circles proceeds" which could be (is?) a definition of the individual human soul. Circles. Each separate consciousness thinks of itself as sufficient in its isolation. But it's also completely naked, battened in by clothes, warmth, associations, place, function, familiarities. Propagation of circles. It's a weird idea.
If you're really an artist, why YOU have done it doesn't really come into the equation. There's work that needs to be done, and that's all there is to it.
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