Life doesn’t come together, at least not in the living of
it. Too many heterogeneous events, too prosaic, too repetitive, too continuous.
Things that seem meaningful get buried under an undifferentiated mass of occurrences.
It’s like when you move somewhere new and in the background of unfamiliar
streets, buildings, and landscapes there is a different smell, a smell that
comes with the place. You tell yourself: “I like this smell. I hope I remember
it always.” But you don’t. The longer you live somewhere the more you lose the
sense of what made it distinct. It merges into the beige of life. That’s the
way important events often feel in life, deprived of their color by the mere
fact of continuing to live.
And that explains the lure of biography. Biography takes the
stuff of life and makes a story. It does so by framing a segment of life as significant.
This is not to say that biography selects only the most meaningful events or
that it ignores the mundane because it does not make for compelling stories. In
fact, nineteenth and twentieth-century literature has taught us that the
opposite is true, that the banal and boring are perhaps the only things worth
narrating in the prose of modernity. Biography, by selecting, declares the
section of life narrated as meaningful. That span of life symbolizes a problem
to be resolved by the story. Biography does what life cannot, delimit. It places
a starting point and an endpoint on a segment of the incessant continuum of
life. Of course life itself starts and stops, but its ending provides something
much larger than narrative closure.
By biography I mean more than the kind of formal biographies
and autobiographies one finds in book stores. I don’t just mean books about the
lives of important people or people that assume that by telling us about their lives
they are important. Nor do I mean only novels that are written as if they were
biographies, whose organic structures are borrowed from the organicity that we
project onto biographies, that they depict the real lives of people. Biography as
I’m using the term here means every story we tell about ourselves in writing or
in everyday speech. It includes every anecdote that features us as hero or victim. All the stories that we tell about ourselves aim to draw some
conclusion by putting a line through life that says “here this began and here
it ended.”
So when One Direction sing “The story of my life/I take her
home/I drive all night to keep her warm/And time is frozen” they seek to
forestall the feeling of aimlessness generated by the pooling of days. In
these words life is not a thing whose very magnitude makes it undecipherable or
even worse unknowable. Instead life is a
story and as a story it at least has a plot if not a purpose. The figure of
time as frozen illustrates perfectly the need behind this sentiment: to have
life stop long it enough for us to understand it. That this desire is rendered
in a bittersweet tone is not significant to the wish-fulfillment that it
reveals. It doesn’t matter that life pauses for us to recognize that what we
get may not be what we want. All that matters is that it pauses.
