3 thoughts on “Are you a novel? or a collection of short stories?”
The more of this conversation I see, the more puzzled I am about what’s at issue. It seems to me that there is a continuum: some people take themselves very seriously and are able to offer a cohesive autobiography at any moment, and other people more or less float along and aren’t concerned with maintaining a cohesive autobiography. Is this all that the debate amounts to?
I feel like I can present a fairly cohesive autobiography about myself and also that I’m lying about it all the way through. Not deliberately, just because I have a terrible memory and a shit-ton of cognitive biases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) and so on. YMMV
Aren’t our “corrective institutions” at stake? I mean, you put a guy in a cell (hopefully the fellow who chose the drapes in this video), isn’t he supposed to sit there and change his tune? Do followers of Heraclitus and Woolf need longer sentences?
USUPhilosophy 
The more of this conversation I see, the more puzzled I am about what’s at issue. It seems to me that there is a continuum: some people take themselves very seriously and are able to offer a cohesive autobiography at any moment, and other people more or less float along and aren’t concerned with maintaining a cohesive autobiography. Is this all that the debate amounts to?
LikeLike
I feel like I can present a fairly cohesive autobiography about myself and also that I’m lying about it all the way through. Not deliberately, just because I have a terrible memory and a shit-ton of cognitive biases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) and so on. YMMV
LikeLike
Aren’t our “corrective institutions” at stake? I mean, you put a guy in a cell (hopefully the fellow who chose the drapes in this video), isn’t he supposed to sit there and change his tune? Do followers of Heraclitus and Woolf need longer sentences?
LikeLike