After a lifetime of experiences and decades of considering the proposition, the moment has arrived. Today I end my autobiography.
While I realize such an endeavor usually starts at the beginning, this autobiography has been told in reverse order (or will be, once I write it).
Let me explain -
A few days ago I celebrated my 58th year. Two months before that, a dear friend who was in excellent health dropped dead in his bath tub at the age of fifty. Further, I am several days into reading the recently published autobiography of Mark Twain - a document he had instructed not to be publically released until one hundred years after his death. These events (and others) have inspired me to finally sit down and conclude my own autobiography, which I have not yet written.
Why an ending? In Mark Twain's book he explains how he has re-invented the format of what an autobiography should be. He complains that organizing one's past in a simple sequence may describe the history of a person yet does nothing to illustrate the true nature of his or her being. Instead, over the course of many years, he arrived at a wholly new approach in which he would dictate his autobiography and let his mind wander through his entire life, skipping time both forward and backward, driven by connections of topic and recollection with disregard for the actual order in which these things occurred. He felt, justifiably from what I have read of it so far myself, that this system would better capture the true nature of the inner man.
Being stuffed all full of ego and ladeled with a greatly inflated self-importance, I have always aspired to write an autobiography of my own. This notion, in fact, has been with me from the moment I first read Ben Franklin's own attempt at such, back when I was only twelve (or fourteen, or some such age around that mark).
So, being at least equally self-centered as either that earlier personage or the one who's effort I am currently exploring, it is no surprise I would eventually take up the world's best excuse for talking exclusively about oneself (as if I haven't done enough of that already, in these last 5.8 decades).
My point, if there is one, is that having read that Twain was all full of himself for having "perfected" the form of the autobiography I felt compelled to go him one better.
And so, I pondered long and I pondered hard, and eventually came to this:
A person is not defined solely by their recollections but also by the fresh and living thoughts and feelings that rise up in him or her constantly. In fact, the present (along with our anticipations of the future) are closer to us than the past and are, therefore, amplified in our considerations.
For these reasons, I have been a prolific diarist over the years, attempting to capture the power and immediacy of events as they unfold. Still, from time to time, such writings have drawn on memories as well. These recollections were not the focus of the entries,however, but rather attempts to provide a context to the here and now.
But an autobiography, by definition, is to be a document centered on the past - an attempt to capture the meaning of a life, the totality of one's journey in this world: to put things into perspective. And yet, that very purpose tends to rob the tale of the energy it had in the living.
No, if I were to carry the form of the autobiography to the next level, I'd need to find a way to combine a focus on the solidified past with the frenzied present and speculations about the uncertain future as well.
The "perfect" autobiography, then, would be one in which that same distorted sense of the leading edge of your life colors and obscures those memories of days gone by that naturally and continually emerge from the mists due to topical connection with the immediate and the speculative view ahead.
But how to capture that? After all, no sooner do you pen your first entry than it immediately becomes the past, somewhere between the history you are recalling and the future entries you have yet to write. Such a tome begins, then, at some mid-point of one's essence as if we picked up a book of fiction and started reading it in the middle, forward. What lunacy is this?
But wait! (Thought I.) Suppose one began at the end and then worked backward to the future? Such an autobiography would start with the last entry and continually add to the head end until the eventual beginning will capture the most accurate impression of to the final totality of the person at his or her last breath (or near enough).
As one would read a book so constructed, each next entry would be the one previously written and, thereby, provide a sense of the evolution of the soul in question, as well as progressively fill in more details of the past and reveal the lineage of one's final expectations of the future.
Unlike previous autobiogrpahiesby others in which one begins the work, completes it, and then dies several undocumented years later, this will be a living work that is perpetually updating and not completed until I am.
The future is uncertain and the past is murky. Both are ever-evolving as context erodes them and eats away at their edges. It is my hope that this Reverse Chronology will avoid those detriments by focusing on the context itself.
And so, today I begin my autobiography, from this moment backward.
The End
