How potent is the desire to be remembered? (or perhaps !) Or is that rather something that the living burden themselves with, and that is wholly irrelevant to the deceased?
A tangential matter is that of the biographer, and this blog post from the commonplace book of John Pistelli seems particularly eloquent. An excerpt:
The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people's mail....I am so tired of the personal lives of writers, artists, and philosophers, the rumors and scandals, the hypocrisies and betrayals, the prejudices and hatreds, the husbands who tormented their wives, the mothers who tortured their children, the Nazis, Stalinists, racists, imperialists, the toadies, the traitors, the thieves. But not only those—even the virtues and the virtuous wear on my nerves.
(go to Start page, to Black Box, to The Hole Left Behind,
No Where, to Preparation, to Modalities)