All My Road Before Me

[breakinglight11]

auroraknight directed me towards a compilation of some of Lewis's early person writing, an edited-down diary he kept as a young man at Oxford from 1922 to 1927, named "All My Road Before Me." I finally started it, and I'm excited to see what it's like. This was kept during his atheist period, a time from which little of his work is often referred to, and I shall be fascinated to see the difference it makes in his work and outlook. I've always been amused by the fact that he actually had something of a distaste for the journaling process, and yet he did it fairly frequently throughout his life and generated some of his most important pieces (like A Grief Observed) that way.

It is not, apparently, to be considered the most instructive or insightful of his personal works. He apparently refers surprisingly infrequently to his wrestling with religion per se, which he said later what an enormous and emotional preoccupation for him during that time. But it's so interesting to see personal stuff about writers that you can use to better understand their work. It's actually been a motivator for me to keep this journal. If I ever were to become important for my writing, I like the idea of my journaling being used as a resource in scholarship of my works. I'd want it to be useful to get an image of who I was as an artist and a person, as well as the course of my work's development.

I wonder if it gives an accurate reflection. If it's anything like how I would characterize it myself.

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[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Last weekend I attended the dedication of a park in Cambridge to the memory of Eitan Stern-Robbins, the son of one of the people who's been involved with T@F over the past several years. It was moving and inspiring in several ways, but most clearly in that his mother had gone through his writings over the past nine months and found snippets dating back to when he was eight that said something about who he hoped to become, what he understood about life, who he truly was, and what was deeply important to him. I was touched by several of the passages, but what has been really sticking with me is the question of what someone would find if they went on a similar search through my writings.