'Biography’ and ‘Autobiography’ are the most abundant shelves in every bookstore. Many other departments ( ‘History’, ‘Crime & Criminals’, ‘Arts & Artists’, ‘Self-Help’, to mention some) are also saturated with biographies.

My overall impressions are scarcely worth the length of the following sentence, and I will surely not detail the reasons for most of my individual choices herein. But - and I guess because I primarily write, rather than read, essays - I was astonished by the single most salient character of the choices considered together. I knew that "confessional writing" now enjoys quite a vogue, but I had no idea how pervasive the practice of personal story telling has become among our finest writers. I can’t help asking myself (although all lives are, by definition, interesting, for what else do we have): why in heaven’s name should I care about the travails of X and Y unless some clear generality about human life and nature emerges thereby? I’m glad that trout fishing defined someone’s boyhood, and I’m sad that parental dementia now dominates someone’s midlife, but what can we do in life but play the hand we have been dealt? ... Still, I hope that the current popularity of confessional writing soon begins to abate.

Stephen Jay Gould: Introduction: To Open a Millennium, in The Best American Assays 2002 (S.J. Gould, Ed.), Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 2002.

Late afternoon at Tantra Lake, Boulder, CO

In late fifties TV came to our house and images of life started to impose on real life. "I won’t watch how other people celebrate New Year" - my mother said - "I like to celebrate it myself".