Soda - Keeping Curious

I’ve decided to put that current hobbyhorse of mine, the ‘fragments’ idea, back onto the agenda. I’m intrigued by an image I have of multiple snapshots that have been generated by the interactions of millions of lives, each offering up, to whoever is interested, a glimpse, an insight, a window (be it a narrow one) on to an individual’s life. In my home library I have hundreds of biographies, (yet only a few autobiographies) the longest of which is no more than a 1,000 pages, with the average being more like 400-500 pages. Many carry the words ‘A Life’ in the title, suggesting that you can cover someone’s life in comparatively few pages. It might be worth noting here that the average lifespan is less than 1,000 months. Less than a 1,000 pages, less than 1,000 months, is there a connection? (Some might argue that even at 500 pages some lives don’t deserve the workout a biographer has given them).

What’s dealt with in a biography are the really important ‘fragments’ of that person’s life. By putting these fragments together through the course of reading a biography we can also let our imagination fill in all the mundane gaps that never get a mention. The questions I’d like to ask of these ‘gaps’ refer to the mundane rituals of a person’s life, those bits which somehow make that person ‘human’ again, or at least makes them someone like us.

For example, I’ve been fascinated (like many) by the life of Winston Churchill, and, with over 50 books on him already, I can claim to know a thing or two about the big, important fragments of his well studied life – the distant but hero-worshipped father, the mother that ‘shone like a star’, the internationally acclaimed Boer War hero, the mad architect of the Dardanelles fiasco, etc. All good, larger-than-life stuff, but there’s also those nagging thoughts, such as what did Churchill have for breakfast and where did he buy his shoes? (Actually as a prolific writer and journalist, Churchill may well have let slip the answer to these two question).

Hold that thought however and now fast forward to the present and the topic of blogging. Is it not true – especially if we see blogging as a form of biography - that we are now just as likely to read about the mundane facts of a person’s life (let’s be honest, more so), that reading about the larger-than-life exploits so well amplified in a traditional biography. The smaller fragments have become as important, because we have made it so. Blogging as helped made it so, and, surprise, surprise, we find it interesting.
When visiting an historic house we look forward with anticipation to visiting the ‘below stairs’ areas, as much as the beautifully decorated public salons. This may in part be due to a question of identification – we English still seem class-conscious/proud. Different parts of a house attract different stories, with different ‘fragments’ on display. When we choose to blog we offer our own fragments from a life, as anyone who’s kept a diary knows, partly to make sense of it, and partly to attest to those fragments we feel compelled to share.