This past week, the author David Shields came to our memoir class. He was our teacher Theo's teacher 14 years ago. Theo had often mused that he had the confidence to write about the things that HE cared about without questioning whether they were important enough.
He certainly is a man of letters, constantly pondering the larger questions. He loved talking about things that mattered (and I don't mean that facetiously). The picture showed him in a characteristic pose (even though I have seen him only this one time). As he talked and thought about things he would look upwards searching for the right idea and words. His eyes look a little funny, maybe a little rolled back but maybe that's appropriate as he was leaving our classroom and even maybe the world for just a moment to articulate what he was processing.
One quote he kept coming back to:
Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition. --- Michel Montaigne French philosopher (1533-1592)
He believed that since every man somehow reflected the important aspects of the human condition than specifically he carried the human condition with him and that important answers to universal questions were contained in his own mind, heart and self.
We read his book Reality Hunger which was difficult but satisfying. Mostly a manifesto exploding literary genre. Fiction -- Nonfiction -- Memoir they really don't make any sense under examination. His preferred form, lyrical essay, is becoming more attractive to me as I go along.
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