This is a book of biographies.
I decided I wanted one of those after having recently written a eulogy for someone. It was an unofficial eulogy (the real ones were given at his funeral by his family and his best friends), but he and I had had quite a few long chats over the years and I felt that I needed to have one more right now.
And once I got into it (and by the way this was in no small part down to who it was that I was chatting to) I found myself expressing my feelings with sincerity. This was a departure from my normal writing style, which tends to be pretty abstract and non-committal. This, I think, is because I usually write to get my thoughts in order, not to express my feelings.
Which brings me back to this book. Into which I have brought that eulogy as a prologue from where it can serve as something of a launchpad for other biographies and such like that I might feel like writing from time to time.
And that will do for this introduction, I think. Except to just flag that while I am planning to keep the sincerity going at least most of the time, I'm sure I won't always be in a reflective mood or even sad if, for example, a person has died. If I ever write a biography on someone like Hitler, for example, I'm sure it won't be quite the panegyric that eulogy for my friend was.
I decided I wanted one of those after having recently written a eulogy for someone. It was an unofficial eulogy (the real ones were given at his funeral by his family and his best friends), but he and I had had quite a few long chats over the years and I felt that I needed to have one more right now.
And once I got into it (and by the way this was in no small part down to who it was that I was chatting to) I found myself expressing my feelings with sincerity. This was a departure from my normal writing style, which tends to be pretty abstract and non-committal. This, I think, is because I usually write to get my thoughts in order, not to express my feelings.
Which brings me back to this book. Into which I have brought that eulogy as a prologue from where it can serve as something of a launchpad for other biographies and such like that I might feel like writing from time to time.
And that will do for this introduction, I think. Except to just flag that while I am planning to keep the sincerity going at least most of the time, I'm sure I won't always be in a reflective mood or even sad if, for example, a person has died. If I ever write a biography on someone like Hitler, for example, I'm sure it won't be quite the panegyric that eulogy for my friend was.
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