autobiographies and epigraphs and I am full of words and lo, thou has misconstrued everything

Both the tone and epigraph of the 2004 autobiography show some of my journey since 1991. I entitled the book, in contrast with the earlier one, 52 and Strangely Found: An Autobiography Intellectual and Intimate. Though I contended I was "lost" in 1991, I was "found" in 2004. But it was not a finding through "Amazing Grace," where I "once was lost, but now am found; was blind but now I see." My "finding" was of a different sort.

The new "finding" of self was a literary one. I gave up the teleological or "purpose-driven" style of my 1991 piece and adopted a more gently ironic style. Meaning was not easily limned; indeed, asking the question of meaning is often the wrong question to ask. I had the benefit of an additional 13 years of living, and could point to how the Kansas experiment had failed pretty dramatically for me. I showed how it was precisely my expectation that there was meaning in life, that there was a plan, a pattern, a direction, a goal, lay at the heart of a most awful series of events for me in Kansas from 1993-1996. And, then, I narrated the end of my marriage, a story that I will not repeat here.

But why, then, when lots of important things had crumbled around me (job and family) would I call the 2004 volume 52 and Strangely Found? Because the series of losses faced finally enabled me to ask the question of how I wanted to structure my life in relation to employment, institutions and style of communication with the world. It forced me to define my own intellectual rhythms apart from the demands of work (a brief career as a trial lawyer from 2000-2003 sucked up a lot of my time, to be sure) and apart from the realities of marriage. Though I rooted around and searched diligently for about a year, I finally "found" the strategy of wide reading, focused mastery of texts, and almost daily writing and publishing to be a strategy that "fit" me. So, I wrote 52 and Strangely Found (even though I celebrated my 53rd birthday two months ago).

But it was the epigraph that also captured my sense of self in 2004. I quoted lines from Shakepeare's Coriolanus, where two of the servants were speaking together about the disguised Coriolanus. They didn't quite know what to make of him. One suggested that in him was more than he could think, while the other agreed, by saying that he was the rarest man in the world. That is how I thought of myself in 2004. Despite the setbacks of Kansas and a failed marriage, and a truncated career as a trial attorney, I emerged with a sense that I was just finding my rhythms in life and that I was, indeed, the "rarest man in the world." In what did that rarity consist? My mind and my heart; my way of putting together knowledge and explaining it; my way of definining a problem and solving it; the combination of what Jonathan Edwards called "an admirable conjuction of diverse excellencies." I finally decided that I should hide that truth no longer and should not shrink from its declaration. So, the second autobiography.

Third and Fourth Autobiographies?

By publishing two autobiographies thirteen years apart, I had unwittingly established a sort of "autobiography schedule." Would the next one come at age 65 and the next at age 78, if I see those days? I don't know, but I have already come up with the epigraphs for those books. Thus, it would be nice to live that long, if for no other reason than to have a proper place to lodge my epigraphs. Well, what are they?

For the projected 2017 autobiography, it will be a verse from the Book of Job. One of my favorite characters is the usually-ignored Elihu, because I think he provides Job guidance on how to see his distress differently than both the friends and Job have conceptualized it to date. But the epigraph will be taken from Elihu's first (of six) chapters, where he is still "warming up" to say something to Job. He says, in 32:18, "For I am full of words." That will be my epigraph in 2017 because it captures what I plan to be the major course of my life between 2004 and 2017, which is to write mini-essays until I can write no more. This medium and method provides a forum to express the kinds of knowledge (and the scope of knowledge) which I think is uniquely desired by the rising generation--"give me the full explanation, but do so in 1000 words." I think it will provide the method by which higher education will increasingly describe itself over the next decade. For, in fact, people have to know very little in order to get undergraduate and graduate degrees in America today. My being "full of words," is my way of saying that I not only fit into this change in temper in America, but that I will help it out, by providing pithy, useful and understandable essays on a number of subjects.

Finally, I have thought about the autobiography when I am 78, to be written in 2030. The epigraph will capture my growing belief that I have spent my life misunderstanding more than understanding things correctly. Thus, the epigraph will also be taken from Shakespeare, but this time from the last Act of Julius Caesar, where a faithful soldier of Cassius comes upon his dead leader (Cassius had just committed suicide) and says, "Alas, thou hast misconstrued every thing" (5.3.84). As I think of life more and more, I am aware of how my life has been a steady stream of misconstruals: of signals sent to me by co-workers and bosses, of things said to me by women, of things ignored from my ex-wife, of messages subtly communicated to me from my parents, of things missed from all sorts of sources. So, the final word of life, as I anticipate it now, will be a sort of ironic one. I have dedicated my life to knowledge and to the clear and forceful exposition of things I believed to be true, but the last word might be "You have misconstrued everything." For one lesson I have learned in life is that you can get so, so many things right but still misconstrue everything.

1137