Jane Kramer's Me, Myself, and I

                This story starts immediately with an array of emotions splattered on paper about a man and what he truly wanted or did not want out of life.  Many people choose to spend their lives with people they love such as, family and friends.  Michel on the other hand, wanted to spend the second portion of his life alone in a tower writing about himself.  At first I felt bad for this man; clearly he was so unhappy in his life that he was willing to leave his family for no better reason than wanting to be alone.  Then I thought that he must have been a little crazy and mostly vain for sacrificing everything to sit and write about himself.  He did however manage to create a very interesting character “myself.”

            Kramer quotes Michel on the second page of the essay saying, “You would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”  He is of course referring to the fact that he is the topic of his books and that it is a waste of time to reading of him.  When I read this I thought of many of the books that I like to read.  If I walked into Barnes and Noble right now I would head straight to the biographies and memoir.  I love knowing people’s stories and what they have done to become famous enough to have a book written about them.  So even though I think Michel is very selfish for what he did I would also be into his books like the French were at the time.  I did not know what to think when he continues to claim that he writes only for himself.  The problem with this is that he is either trying to say that he does not want people to give him attention for his writing or that he only cares about himself so he has no need for the attention.  Nevertheless, people seemed to really care about these writings.  It gives me the erg to find a copy myself, although, I have a feeling that I would have a hard time understanding it.

            On page three of the essay we begin to find out what the essays are about and how intellectually stimulating they really are.  I really liked how Kramer describes the essays when she says, “You could call them autobiography of the mind, but they made no claim to composing the narrative of life, only of the shifting preoccupations of their protagonist in an ongoing conversation with the Greek and Roman writers on his library shelves-and, of course, himself.”  This passage really gave me a new idea to the writing process.  Michel had dedicated his entire life to writing and the only people he had to bounce his ideas off of were the authors of the books on his shelf.  I found it so profound that he was able to write so brilliantly and I can picture him sitting in his library wondering how the Greek and Roman writers thought about a specific topic and exploring that same topic for himself.  There is so much depth to this essay but I really found that Kramer was able to capture what Michel was trying to say in his essays without spelling everything out.  She left us to wonder about life and what it really means, also, how the self continues to evolve with changing situations.

Gary Will's "Daredevil"

This is a story of great friendship and the author Garry Will tells it with passion.  At first this story did not really catch my attention but after awhile I began to think of Bill as my friend and I wanted to learn about his life and the kind of person that he was.  It took only the first story to get the idea that Bill was and why he was so important to Willis.  When Will told the story about the said boat incident I saw both how daring and brave Bill was when he saved is friend who had fallen overboard without an ounce of fear.  Will goes on to describe some of the stigmas that Bill had to deal with such as, social snob, ideological snob, and intellectual snob.

I thought that at some points Will was making Bill sound almost to perfect.  No one is flawless and I thought that Will did not want to admit that Bill had any flaws.  Now the more I thought about it I could see why it would be difficult to talk about anything other than how great he was.   The section about social snob show how kind and generous he was to his friends.  I thought it was wonderful and Bill set Will up with his sister, it shows that he truly cared a lot about making his friends happy and his family too.  Bill also had a spirit for helping people out of small bind such as, leaving a briefcase at the airport.  I thought this brought a down to earth persona to Bill’s personality. 

The second issue, ideological snob, was quickly pushed aside by Will’s statement in the final paragraph of the section.  “By the time of his death, even Bill’s earlier critics admitted that he had done much to make conservatism respectable by purging it of racism and fanatical traits earlier embedded in it.”  This was powerful for me because it showed that Bill was able to bread down the barriers that had been built around his political party and show that in his lifetime he had made a difference.  The paragraph goes on to describe men in Bill’s party that had created the prejudices and how Bill was able to distance himself and his followers from these men.

Finally, intellectual snob, one point in this portion of the essay stuck out to me because I was able to relate to the words.  “Bill lived and wrote and lectured- and played and socialized and exercised- at a furious pace.  Partly because he bored so easily. But party to make money.”  Some may say that to do these things simple because he was bored or to make money is greedy and selfish.  But I see it as determination, because he did not want to live off of what other people had done.  I have also been one to want to make my own money and not live off of my parents forever.   I am a strong believer in working hard and if it means at a furious pace like Will says then that is what had to be done.