Coming on Homo Vitruvius
Tomorrow
Vitruvians, readers, all,
Regular readers know that I set myself the task a few months back, quite spontaneously, to draft and publish in real time from week to week, at book length, a kind of memoir — not of the personal events of my life but rather of my intellectual and spiritual development, recounting how my education and selected autobiographical details contributed to that progress. I titled it Reason for Being in the World.
In addition to other creative writing projects, varied in nature, that I hope to leave behind and still complete while I remain sentient, it seemed at this point in my life, at least to me, an important statement I needed to make. Many writers on Substack are exercising all kinds of inventiveness in their projects and endeavors — Substack arriving when it did seems to have tapped a well of creativity in a great many people — so I felt comfortable in these environs pursuing this new kind of effort for me.
In any impromptu exercise of such a kind — I’ve labeled the work an “exercise in intellectual and spiritual accounting” — the writer is bound to encounter the unexpected. Not fully anticipated by me, then, as one example, has been the challenge of chapter 6, coming as it does, now, after several chapters in which I detailed my father’s endangered Jewish childhood in Ukraine around the time of the Russian Revolution, and my lifelong effort to learn about it. Chapter 6, following, is entitled “The Persecution of the Jews.”
As I’ve said before, it’s a lot. It’s too much. It was, in different ways, at times, too much for me. If you think you have a good understanding of the history of Jewish persecution, whatever your proximity to or interest in the topic may be, there’s an excellent chance, nonetheless, that you don’t really. This is Substack, and you’re reading Homo Vitruvius, and there are a lot of very smart, educated, and otherwise knowledgeable people on Substack and reading Homo Vitruvius, so maybe you, in fact, do. But many will not.
One element in the too muchness of the writing of chapter 6 has been finding a way to treat the subject in a single chapter. It could be a book. It has been books. I had a purpose, though – part of a greater, hybrid, often creative whole – different from a straight historical account. How could I select and concentrate the history to a manageable length, to my purpose, and still serve that purpose? That has been part of the work, and it has been hard. In fact, I wasn’t able to keep the chapter to what is, by Substack standards, a manageable length. I publish longer pieces than most Substackers, and chapter 6 is long even by my standards. But unlike chapter 5, there was no dramatically appropriate break point for two parts — and it would, anyway, run counter to the whole thrust of my account to break it up.
It is too much. It is supposed to be too much. As it was in the living, it is supposed to accumulate and weigh and burden and bend and almost crush, as it almost did the Jewish people, but didn’t, ever, even after the Holocaust, in the living of it.
But it needn’t be broken up by me. As with anything you read, it needn’t be read in a single sitting. You can break it up yourself. If you read it, you might just want to take breaks. I took breaks in the writing. I had to. But I always came back quickly, because I had to do that, too. If you read it, I hope you’ll have to.
If you read it. You don’t have to read it. You don’t have to know.
AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
Looking forward ...