Reason for Being in the World: Table & Chapters
A table of contents page for Reason for Being in the World, with links to all chapters published so far.
What first surrounded me in childhood — after myself, that is, in my self-comforting consciousness and my familiar body, and after my family — was my Americanness, which was so readily apparent because so enveloping: my Americanness within the ever expanding and enriching American culture of the 1950s and 60s boom, of which I was a baby born.
Only somewhat less pervasive – and even more notable for that reason – was that I was Jewish.
from Welträson, chapter 1 of Reason for Being in the World
I write and publish Reason for Being in the World even as I imagine it, then more fully conceive it from chapter to chapter, ruminating on the life of the world at a pivotal time, on my life at a turning point toward its own conclusion, and on the beliefs and experiences that shaped me, one human life among billions that have advanced through time and space on this one planet, briefly flashing in my evanescence like a neutrino detected.
Not at all fully a memoir of my private life, the book serves rather as an account of my mental formation and my orientation toward meaning in the world — what shaped me, not particularly as I am in intimate relations but who I emerged to be in my facing out to the world, like the figure above, a product of the intellectual and personal experiences that I, in turn, shaped into both a personal and a public self.
The plan is to present in the accounting how an intellectual and spiritual world view emerged from the concrete experience of a lived life — mine — and not detached from it in some merely abstract acquisitions of mind. It is, further, for me, an urgent response to the world as I find it now: now that I have moved by an unaccountable and, surely, diabolical magic into my eighth decade.
It isn’t my intent to suggest that the ideas that have shaped my intellect may be reduced to the experiences that more emotionally and bodily battered the person into being. It isn’t my purpose to show that I lived my life according only to the beliefs that confirmed and comforted me. I don’t believe either of those propositions to be true. But if we are whole human beings, then it is worth exploring how experience and even our most well-considered ideas form a totality, of our individual being in the world.
How can we scrutinize our particular lives to recognize the universals that might be drawn from them? How are we able to propound universal truths with care when applying them to particular lives? How do I see my own life with those thoughts in mind? How do I view the world through which I’ve made passage looking now around me?
Since I publish in real time, so to speak — as I revise, until the last moment, first drafts each time I press publish — I have continued to revise, structurally, the entire scheme, including, since the start, the scope, the length, and the title of the work. Since I began writing, then afterwards resolved to publish the completed whole as a book, I determined that I would add to the work as chapters earlier essays of memoir that I see as true to the focus of this account — which isn’t at all, and doesn’t seek to be, a complete story of my life. I offer it as the subtitle states: an intellectual and spiritual accounting of identity. Those many late added chapters are offered here in appended links at the end as “preliminary” chapters — outside, when they were written, the inchoate mental design of the memoir. Once I begin to redraft with a more focused eye on the final form, I will make many decisions about how to revise and where to integrate those preliminaries and even alter, to some extent, the original order of the chapters.
In the meantime, this experiment in almost real-time writing — readers are not observing the keystrokes, deletions, additions, and cuts and pastes as they appear on the screen — continues, with only a few chapters yet to go. If you’re reading these words, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. I can make a couple of humble requests, which you are, of course, free to exercise any number of good reasons not to meet, and I will stay, as I often do, “You read; therefore, the writer exists.” Thank you. If you can meet them, you have a writer’s deepest gratitude.
First, if you like what you read, please actually click “like”! If you have thoughts you might share of any connective kind, I’d love to read them, and so would fellow readers. If you think others might enjoy this writing, please share, restack, and quote. All of these acts help connect us, writers and readers, to each other, and algorithmically, they draw additional and new readers, what every writer wants and needs. You will be aiding me. Thank you.
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Click here to visit the Table of Contents and Chapters page
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
You reveal a part of the process here of creating and then how editing works as the secondary but essential part. I will be reading again from the beginning because you are so worth the time, the effort, the force of "the word."