“My story therefore will be at once a very personal one and it will be a history of my sort and my time. An autobiography is the story of the contacts of a mind and a world. The story will begin in perplexity and go on to a troubled and unsystematic awakening... with various incidental, good, interesting or curious things that happened by the way.”
~ H. G. Wells
I love biographies. We all do.
When H. G. Wells’ Experiment in Autobiography finally reached my reading list, its style and clarity triggered the start on this work in earnest, a task that had languished at the back of a lazy brain since retirement several years ago. He shows how the material of life, swirling in formless memories and as fading documents and photos that anchor them, might unfold into a printed story.
Wells relates his everyday happenings not merely to his person, but to society, to the world at large, and even to workings of civilisation itself. Like so many of his generation, he faced particularly hard times, struggled at the edge of destitution, even starvation, and then saw two world wars almost destroy civilisation, along with his generation’s optimism and utopian hopes.
I was struck by the details he recalls from childhood and early youth, and it makes me wonder if my memory is up to the task of producing more than a mere outline of those days from so long ago. I'm a decade older than Wells when he began. Memory must be fading, if not failing, so this will be a test of what has survived decades of unretrieved storage. I always assumed the details will be there when I needed them, and now the day is here I'm not so sure.
Will the act of autobiography summon the retrieval of events that, at this moment, effectively don’t exist? What can I recover from my first five years? Is there anything still there other than those regularly reinforced highlights - a dozen or so - that flash in the mind when it idly reviews that fading distant time?
Forced by the act of writing to lay it out step by step will be the test. How much can I find? Are those oft-visited highlights the sum total of my early life? My sense of self is rooted in them. Was, is, the entirety of my first five years based on a dozen images, and thereby an extrapolation? Did I truly I live that childhood? Do photographs evoke the memories, or are the memories generated by a lifetime of perusing those images?
If there's no actual memory, can it be said that I existed?
We shall see.