ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are re–
lated with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological con–
nection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up
to
him
to
interpret things the way he understands them, and
thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information
lacks.
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As I understand it, the message for a biographer implicit
here is to leave the search for the interrelations of the levels of a
life story- and thus for the meaning of a life-to the reader. The
best way to avoid the temptation
to
capture "the essence of a life"
and
to
keep open the question of its meaning is to trust one's
readers;
to
trust the bonds, the
rapports,
the biographer and the
reader have as contemporaries . Such bonds are what Hannah
Arend t called "the world."
Acts of biographical memorialization must be made from
love, which is uncontrivable and uncommandable. And not
from love of the subject's thought, personality, psychological
uniqueness, or typicality-not from any measure of the subject's
importance generally or to the biographer as an individual. Acts
of biographical memorialization are for the world, from love of
the world.
