To Write Or Not To Write?

I have often contemplated, and even been urged, to write an autobiography, but have consistently postponed it until such time as I can't do much else, such as when my emphysema will reach a point where I sit around and search the web for cheap oxygen canisters.

But it's more than that. It seems to me that to be worth foisting onto other people with a "Please read and review this". it would have to be more than a sequence of anecdotes and name droppings. It would have to approximate the concept of Bildungs Roman, of which the novels of Hermann Hesse are a clear example; a tale of the gradually evolving consciousness of a person. Anecdotes would have to mark moments of realisation, not necessarily entheogenic, but of the nature of humans and the general question of WTFIGO. But I suspect that I'm not interesting enough as a character or mind for the story of How I Became What I Am to be worth the effort, especially as age tends to bring with it the realisation not only that "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity", but that Life Is Not A Story, and that casting it in the form of one ensures that, as Glenn Gould said or implied, autobiography is definitely a subgenre of imaginative fiction, placing in mind-created timespace what really takes place in an eternal Now. I would be inclined to balance that by showing some continuity between the various disillusionments that determined changes in direction and perspective, featuring the recurrent (and to me welcome) realisation that everything I hitherto believed was wrong (or should I say "wrnog"?).

It could be entertaining if I described some of my Meetings With Remarkable People or friendships with celebrities and the rich, but mainly in how for the most part such experiences cured me of interest in fame, fortune and ambition. I fear it might be something of a downer for the reader, though, as I would have to chronicle how an entire generation in America and parts of Europe felt like outsiders in the 60s and created the so-called counterculture, with the vast majority of them gradually morphing into the Me Generation, learning to mock people such as myself, who don't see it as moving on from naive idealism to Being Realistic to hold, for example, that it actually makes more sense even from a hardcore empirical perspective to hug a tree than to cut it down for garden furniture or artisanal firewood. ( I recall in childhood being repelled by watching fish die in the bottom of the boat, and feeling something was wrong when I learned that my uncle's waterskis, which I so enjoyed using on Lake Winnepesaukee, were made from a giant redwood. (It's probably good to get an early start to accepting you're a weirdo.))

Writing an autobiography would, of course, provide ample excuse for the type of rambling you see above, and would doubtless lead to vast swathes of nested parentheses....