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I N T R OD U CT I O N BY
André Aciman Write for yourself, they say. But that’s such nonsense. We wouldn’t know how. Even in our most private journals, either encrypted or kept under lock and key, we are not really writing for ourselves but for strangers who are so much like us that they might as well be altered selves bearing our first and last names. Why else do we spellcheck our diary entries, or make sure that our sentences are never fragmentary or written on the fly, but retain the accuracy and syntactic polish of what we mean to communicate? We know a lot about ourselves. We know our worst faults; but we don’t always like to be reminded of them. We may confide to our closest friends, to our partners, to our shrinks, but always with a touch of adornment, discretion, and adjustment, and when making our foulest and most shameful confessions, the cadence in our sentences is one of the many ways we burnish what we’re reluctant to fess up. But when we wake up in the middle of the night and know who we are, it’s an entirely different matter. We are horrified by what we’ve said, done, confessed, imagined, dreamt, and swear we’ll never write down. Still, we know that by the time we are fully awake the ugly truths we’ve dredged up at night will show themselves to be ore, not dross. The burnishing is art; the rest, as we soon realize, is incidental.
