Windows of Intimacy... that tell us about history

Perusing back through recent editions of Time Magazine, as they float over to me many weeks after publication from one of my former addresses, I discovered the article by Joel Stein who was being accused of writing far too much in the first person. "You can't spell Time without an 'I' and a 'me'", he claims in the title, and then proceeds to defend himself against many people who call him a culprit of this so-called Age of Individualism by saying that he is merely doing what everyone else on Facebook or reality TV or via their blogs are doing: just talking about themselves.

"It's now expected that writers insert themselves in stories," a psychology professor claims. 


My question is, when haven't they? It is the philosophical quandary of the finger pointing to itself. A writer is never entirely objective. (Nor are historians. I thought we'd all agreed on that by now.)

This false objectivity is most obvious in an interview. Interviews, fortunately or unfortunately, generally follow the same format, and the questions or the impressions that the subject gives the writer tend to reveal more about the writer. It becomes much too difficult to grasp the subject away from the prism that the writer placed over him or her. Moreover, since the majority of people one reads about one has never met, one lazily assumes the subject must be quite like that in real life, as reported by a much more real (read: easier to relate to) person: the journalist.

Where is the harm in people's writing about themselves? After all, that's all they talk about, don't they?

Granted there are some people who have no business writing about themselves because their writing style is so poor. Yet, that is why some people tend to get published and others don't. Not that editors don't ever miss a gem here and there, but that is a gripe for another article.

For example, I deeply enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love and her Coyote Ugly article, and both are totally subjective and personal. In fact, I don't think I'd be interested  in her opinions about the state of the world. Her own microcosm is the state of a world. It just so happens that the world in question includes New York City, journalists, the downtown scene, the NY literary scene and travel that includes "finding oneself." In short, her world, as well as her hopes and fears about her place in society and intimate relationshipsis, is one that coincides with many a cosmopolitan Western woman's. 

Distressed I would not find a counterpoint to the claim that we are living the irremediable degradation of writing, I was thrilled to discover in the NYT this morning, an book review published yesterday entitled: "Conversations Across Centuries with the Father of all Bloggers" by Patricia Cohen about a new book by Sarah Bakewell called "How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer." In it, Bakewell claims that Montaigne, with his thoughts meandering through his essays - a term he invented from the French essai - is because of this precise mixture of the intellectual and the personal is the predecessor to all contemporary writers, passing through Pope, Hazlitt and Woolf on the way. 

The beauty is not only that he did quite shamelessly write about himself, (claiming that his Essays was the only book in the world of its kind), but he admitted that subject of his writing was merely "vain and worthless."  Thus Montaigne provides us with the two specific keys to analyze the quality of an essai, or, in this case, a blog: 

1. Beyond its being personal, is the writing intellectual, as in, does it provoke thought? Does it tell us about history, or the period in which the writer lives?

2. Either through humor or other elements of self-reflection, does the writer have a sense of the limits of his own perspective?

And the other quality that brings Montaigne right up to date is the intimate quality that comes off his freestyle prose, which he claims is only an result of his own inadequacy: his ignorance, doubts and uncertainty. 


Excessive intimacy is perhaps what Joel Stein is accused of (among other character flaws) but the question is (if one considers his writing style any good) what does his writing tell us about how we live? Perhaps one could argue that it tells us too little? Or that his particular microcosm, like Elizabeth Gilbert's, is much too limited to be of any real or lasting interest? For now, the editors of Time believe it isn't. Perhaps only time will tell which writers will rise and remain afloat above the sea of blog.