Grant dies days after completing his memoir. The first time a U.S. president had recollected the events of their life to the public. Certainly not a writer by trade but a remarkably enchanting storyteller (according to accounts from his neighbors and his soldiers), a sickly Grant, dying of cancer and recently swindled out of the money that would have been otherwise left to his family, turned to prose to meet his ends. That sense of urgency is something that I do not see captured in the works of today. Simply, it has been lost. I fear most people, even the most seemingly well-meaning, have nothing I care to listen to. What could they possibly have to teach me with the lives they have lived? I am no Melville, but I do feel you have to possess the turmoil his biographer Newton Arvin described as having dwelled inside the young man, a result of his adventures at sea:
the origins of his rebelliousness lay deep in his nature and his experience, and the events of his wanderyears had ended by creating in him a settled hatred of external authority, a lust for personal freedom. He was of course the descendant of rebels and, besides that, he was already infected by the famous individualism of his era, its self-trustful defiance of all arbitrary and unspontaneous control. But this was only part of the story, and the less important part; what was more important was something more obscure and more idiosyncratic than that, and something harder to define: the growing and intensifying sense of his own exceptionalness as a person, his possession of only dimly apprehended great gifts, and the ways in which he was more and more deviating from the normal and familiar roads; along with these, the resentful sense that circumstances and mankind together had already imposed their will upon him in a series of injurious ways.
For the first time, I do not just feel but I wholly believe it in my bones that I have something important to say. However, dust does not care about ideas because ideas do not matter. Everyone has ideas. I have to keep working before the dust has time to build, locking up my joints and filling my lungs, eventually reducing me to a skeleton covered in cobwebs clutching a long forgotten treasure. I cannot die before I get this thing out of me.
Everything I do or make or engage with tells me something about this central project that I did not know. It was really not so long ago that I realized I have never completed anything of such a considerable magnitude because in fact I am scared of completing anything.
videophage.com 
Leave a comment