“My life story is the story of my work.” --- Balzac.
When
a genius dies, his soul lives on as his will, objectified in his creation, but
his vita lives in the care of others, either as a biography, or as a
legend. As for me, I will be satisfied to take his legend over biography any
time. After all, what really matters is the heritage tangibly left by the
genius, rather than the details of his life, oftentimes sordid, left to us by
his occasionally uncharitable contemporaries. When we say that a person is larger
than life, unless of course we do not mean it literally, don’t we
imply by that, as well, that his life is far larger than any biography, which
makes it a true legend?
This
does not mean to suggest that all solidly biographical facts of a genius’s life
ought to be dismissed in an offhanded fashion. In the course of writing my
biographical entries, I am much tempted to look beyond the immortal works, into
the temporal life of the genius. However, under no circumstances am I going to
play the critical historian with my facts. Such littleness adds little value to
the effort. Long live Herodotus and his brand of history!
On
the other hand, there is some undeniable merit in the “life and times”
approach, which puts the person into a historical context, and allows us to
reap some extra complementary benefits from such an endeavor. Bertrand
Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is essentially of this nature,
and there is nothing “little” about that approach. It is, therefore, much
better to remain uncommitted as to the conditions and restrictive
qualifications of my own approach to biography. Everything worthwhile is
welcome in it, and the only one condition imposed on this class of entries is
not to be a nitpicker, which is, of course, a synonym for critical
historiography.
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