Lew Schwartz writes: > Thanks. To complement your point about memory, I'll just cite Proust's > awesome achievement. In order to understand these diverse elements, one > cannot separate aesthetics from autobiography. > > Your last phrase can be read forward and backward. I agree with both ways.
That is, the phrase may be saying it's doubtful any autobiography is totally reliable history; the writer's mind is bound to want to "improve" reality. Or it may be saying that what a person has read/heard/seen/felt in life is bound to affect the person's "aesthetic" impulses. (Although the great ballerina Allegra Kent once told me something perhaps to the contrary. As a very young girl in Texas who'd never seen a ballet in her life, she was one day brought to her first. The impact on her was immediately so powerful and profound that she determined that day this was what she wanted to do with her life -- and she never wavered thereafter.)
