Speculating

I'm not exactly sure what it is I should be writing here. The premise of this project is the analysis of memoirs and the memories that compose them. Yet this in itself is not a particularly expansive topic. It's difficult to write about memories. They're complex, multifaceted, obscured by a haze of subjectivity. When you write about memories, you run a treacherous gamut of emotional and logical issues. It's only too easy to fall into the hackneyed recitation of past events. Indeed, anyone can relate a memory; we all do it everyday when we talk to our friends or banter with family. But it takes more effort to distill something meaningful from memories, along with a a lot of candor and instinct. So maybe that's what this journal/blog is about? Extracting from memories something powerful and original to be articulated in the forum of class discussion and personal writings.

I don't know. I'm just speculating.

Anyhow, I've been thinking about my own memories, about the moments that have lodged most stubbornly in my mind. As I string them together in my mind, I'm beginning to see the beginnings of my own memoir, my own body of life. There's stories I could tell, memories to be related. I'm not sure if they're any good. Many of them are not certainly, but it's interesting, at least to me, to think of how my life would appear in memoir form. I feel that memoirs can seem pretentious sometimes, as if the memoir writer is extolling some special quality to his own life, raising it to some higher plane perhaps. One could even go further and say writing a memoir is the ultimate form of self flattery. Yet the fact remains that we all have stories to be told, and the best memoirs in my opinion are not defined by extreme, nigh on unbelievable circumstances or tremendous feats of heroism; the best memoirs dredge the depths of mediocrity, lending lyrical beauty to the trappings of ordinary life.