“Memoir is not what happened (if we’re lucky, that’s the best journalism). It is what has happened over time, in the mind, in the life as it attends to these tantalizing, dismaying, broken bits of life history. Such personal writing is, as the essay is, ‘an attempt.’ It is a try at the truth. The truth of a self in the world. 

The spring of 1975 I heard for the first time about the Czech philosopher and exile of the seventeenth century (so many Czech centuries, each with its philosopher exile), Jan Komensky, Comenius as he is known in the West. His book, a great autobiographical testimony and philosophical treatise, Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart, bears in its doubleness the real enterprise of writing a life: not psychology, not even spirituality, and certainly not the American enterprise of  ‘finding a self.’ Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history’s night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history.  A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.”

From “An International Incident,” in The Waterstone Review.

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