Dispatches from the middle

Day 2: For today’s entry, I’d first thought of profiling three authors – Paul Theroux, Haruki Murakami, and Ilija Trojanow – whose life trajectories I find particularly fascinating. Collectively they’ve written novels, novellas, short stories, long stories, travel memoirs, fiction, non-fiction, historical fiction, journalistic reportage, and doubtless much more. They’ve volunteered with the Peace Corps, owned jazz clubs, founded publishing houses, run (ultra)marathons, earned degrees, learned numerous languages (Theroux alone speaks 6 or 7, Trojanow is probably not far behind, perhaps even ahead), and traveled the world in search of story and experience.

But then, contemplating the three paragraphs I’d write, I got to thinking more about the paragraphs themselves – the likes of which Wikipedia already has on offer – than about the subjects. Paragraph length bios are the slickest little things! They’re completely undemanding; they require nothing whatsoever from the reader, simply providing a snapshot of all the good and memorable things a person’s done. There’s no need for compromise, or acceptance, or forgiveness; there’s no moral ambiguity, no extenuating circumstances. In fact, there’s nothing remotely personal in such a bio at all. As such, these little sketches make me wonder what has been left out, because that is, inevitably, the really good stuff.

Take Sara, for example:

Sara, red-haired and freckled, wears bright skirts and scarves, bracelets and toe-rings.  She leaves a cloud of incense and insensitivity wherever she goes and writes down every purchase she makes in a little black book with a Star Trek sticker pasted on the back cover. Sara is very quiet. There are three people, specially chosen, in the world with whom she will openly converse, and none of them live anywhere near her. For all her decorations, Sara much prefers to be naked, and spends many hours each day in the bathtub. She has a fish who is also named Sara and a leather jacket, which she never wears. Every night she eats a bowl of popcorn while playing the piano. Bob Dylan wrote a song about (a) Sara, to which Sara has always felt a sort of kinship. Sara is beautiful and doesn’t know it. But, in all fairness, she knows very well that she doesn’t know. Sara frees bugs trapped in houses and cars and swimming pools and loves to make lists. She cannot sing and finds it difficult to draw real things. Sara has trouble making friends.

Is that not better? Maybe?