'A Minute Passage of Private Life'

A young reader asks “Why ‘anecdotal’?” It was a last-minute decision that Sunday afternoon almost eighteen years ago. I had it narrowed down to three or four potential titles but liked the legal/criminological connotation of “anecdotal evidence,” which is always judged suspect by officialdom. I was also thinking of a remark by Dr. Johnson reported by Boswell in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785):

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”

I had no interest in a “big book,” a “tome.” I was digitally naïve but relished the independence of a blog. No editors breathing down my neck. So many blogs back in 2006 were badly written (not that much has changed). I figured I could do better. There is something “down-home” about anecdotes. Everyone collects them and some of us enjoy them. Their informality is a given not contradicted by my devotion to a semi-formal but non-academic style.

In English, the original meaning of “anecdote” Dr. Johnson tells us in his Dictionary was “something yet unpublished; secret history,” like samizdat. Nicely evocative of a non-aligned sensibility at work. Then Johnson adds the definition of “anecdote” as it evolved: “It is now used, after the French, for a biographical incident; a minute passage of private life.” That’s the real gem, written “aphoristically.”

Irving Howe helped me settle on the blog’s title. In “Anecdote and Storyteller,” posthumously collected in A Critic’s Notebook (1994), he defines an anecdote as a “brief, unelaborated, often humorous account of a single incident, taken to be piquant in its own right.” He adds: “One of its attractions is that in times of dislocation, the anecdote holds out the possibility that human beings may still connect, perhaps only briefly, through memory and story.”