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.
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