Sunday, November 3, 2013

If you find yourself...


...speaking, writing incessantly about yourself, don't.

Consider scaling back your egoism and desperation for celebrity to almost negligible quantities. Consider how many who were truly interesting are dead and silent. Consider how many of them, even when alive, kept rather quiet about themselves.

And consider someone like Nina Berberova, who wrote an autobiography. She did it cool. So much in that book about her life flows toward the reader with a kind of ostensible pulse. Her written presence appears mostly as an implicit form around which and through which others are brought to written presence. Decisively and in good taste, her thoughts about herself are subdued with a genuine and diffuse irony.

Yes, that's the ticket: if you must speak, write about yourself, do so quietly, humbly, ironically.



No comments:

Post a Comment