Biographer of Insignificant Lives

Right after the “exclusive” biography of Apple icon Steve Jobs was released in 2011, I had an opportunity to read an excerpt. Captivated, I decided I wanted a copy.

When my penny-pinching ploy to snag a free version at the library backfired (I was still twenty-somethingth on the waiting list and languishing as December trudged along), my family gave me the 656 page hardcover edition as a Christmas present. A nice gesture on their part, it also gave me some cognitive dissonance: now that I had it, I actually had to read it.

Fast forward nearly two and a half years, the book still unread. When I discovered an unabridged compact disc version of the audio book on the library’s website, I snagged it. I was anticipating some long stretches of time on the road and this would bring a welcome divertissement. After all, if I couldn’t read the book cover to cover, couch potato style, I could at least assimilate it in bite sized pieces, one trip at a time.

Now that I’m well into the thing, I find myself disappointed. Not in the biographer, of course; Walter Isaacson has impeccable credentials. It’s Jobs himself who triggered my disappointment. I found myself entangled in a mental wrestling match upon encountering the many actions, decisions, philosophies and attitudes which Jobs capitalized on—but with which I disagreed.

Perhaps that is why he is famous. And I am not.

Which leads to one of those irresistible vortices that suck you—the unsuspecting witness—into its grasp. The vacuum at the center of that chicken-or-egg whirlpool: do we read about people like him because they are famous? Or are they famous because everyone reads about them?

Perhaps stories like Jobs’ are read because of an innate and compelling human tendency to follow the famous. We are groupies, all of us, vacant of self-actualization but like a magnet, possessed of an ability to point to the true north of stardom—the stardom of Someone Else.

We, the aggregated followers, create the lift that elevates those Somebodies-Else and permits us to be sucked along in their wake, clamoring all the while for stories, more stories about our idols.

While we look toward those gleaming stars, meanwhile, the stories of thousand—well, actually, millions—of others fall by the wayside. They are the stories of the unimportant. The daily drudges of life. The insignificant.

I have a dream—and I call it “dream” for a reason—that I will someday turn each of these insignificant life stories into a book. That I will scoop up the crumbling artifacts of the unfamous soldiers, nurses, policemen, teachers—and yes, even the housewives and mothers who sit at home, tentatively nibbling bonbons while sobbing over soap operas—and transform them into words settled on a printed page. The kind of pages that will long outlive both them and the people who remembered them.

Then, the seventeen-year-old who couldn’t bear the wait to fight for his country, the insignificant blind and deaf man who crafted furniture to support his family, and the young mother whose husband abruptly left her for the haven of a New World may be preserved in memory for a generation which never met them.

I say “dream,” though, because this hope comes coupled with a fear: a fear that it will never happen.

Who would read the tale of an insignificant life? Don’t we all bear those common markings of such everyday happenings? Why would we read, in others, the very struggles we’ve known in ourselves?

Yet these are stories which implore that they be written. Insignificant or not, they are stories that deserve to be told. Somebody will want to know. Somebody.

Before these stories slip away—and with every passing year, they do fade from mind—I feel compelled to capture them. While I may not write those books—or, if I do, they may never get read—there is a way to preserve those memories.

It’s a blog. Like this one. This one for my stories, your blog for your stories. We put our stories out there and invite anyone who wants to join us in remembering to capture the essence and help to preserve it. To pass it along.

It’s been three years since that Sunday—Mother’s Day—May 8, 2011, when I hit “publish” on my first post for this blog. That was 1097 posts ago. There have been all sorts of numbers and statistics to mull over in the journey beyond that first post. Some have been encouraging, some make me needlessly fear my readership is mostly comprised of spam bots. Yet after these few years, I’ve realized it’s not about the numbers, it’s about the words: words that enable people like you and me to become biographers of the insignificant. We alone may be the ones who can have that kind of “exclusive” story.

  
Above: a common daisy chain; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.