'Life Felt From the Inside Out'

“The story we live out isn’t the story others read in the facts of our lives.” 

Facts tell half the story, at most. They’re important but misleading. Reduce a man to his C.V. or “data” (the object of worship in our day), and you’ve learned little about him that’s essential, assuming the information is accurate. It has taken a lifetime to understand that even the people we know best are never fully knowable or transparent. How could they be when we remain opaque to ourselves? Nor is that necessarily a bad thing. Only totalitarians want to know everything about us. Let people remain precious mysteries.

 

The passage quoted at the top is the poet W.S. Di Piero writing in the October 2006 issue of Poetry, later recycled in his preface to City Dog: Essays (2009). He continues: “The hardest memoir to make is one that represents the flowing along of life felt from the inside out. But readers hear the tune they want to hear, not the one being played. I gag on the version strangers construct to explain my life—inner-city working-class person makes good . . .”

 

The finest such memoir -- “life felt from the inside out” – is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. And yet it includes much historical “data,” starting with the Bolshevik Revolution, the murder of his father, multiple exiles:

 

“One is moved to speak more eloquently about these things, about many other things that one always hopes might survive captivity in the zoo of words—but the ancient limes crowding close to the house drown Mnemosyne's monologue with their creaking and heaving in the restless night.”