Today is one of those calendar dates I like: one in which an historical figure I like had (or made) something happen. Today I remember the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots [links to image from the movie Elizabeth the Great].
Mary isn't an ancestor. I wasn't named for her; there's no particular reason she's one of the figures from history who resonates with me. I don't even like her much, based on the little I know about her. (Fleeing to England's queen to save her life, and intriguing to depose that same queen at the same time--Machiavellian, or stupid. Or both.)
But, having noticed her, I notice things about myself. Perhaps that is one of the uses of biography: discovering myself in other people.
I sometimes say I'm lonely, but it's not just loneliness, but a sense of alienation: just not like the others. Biography in some sense calls out that trait in other people: something about a life that distinguishes the person that had it, something that made them, too, "not like the others."
Reading biography is like participating online, for me. I can explore another mind, with limited risk: things aren't happening in real-time, I can instantly disengage if I don't like what's going on, and I can communicate in the written word, not my mouth which so often says "it" wrong--ie, more bluntly than other people can hear comfortably, or hyperbolically, or just too intensely. Participating online is a little riskier: I am, after all, revealing myself with every comment, in a way that doesn't happen even if someone knows I'm reading a particular biography. Online leaves a visible trail; reading, mostly an invisible one. Only a tiny fraction of what I read makes it into a comment, a blog, a post.
Mary couldn't make up for her lack of common sense with courage, so she turned her assets into a magnificent and effective message, which proved her motto well-chosen: En ma fine et my commencement. In my end is my beginning.
The end of my attempts to hold myself solely responsible for a "willful 'eccentricity'" is my beginning to selectively work out what I can do, based on my evolving sense of the possible, and the courage to do it, based on my character.
In my end is my beginning.
Forty-six years after being executed for attempting to topple her cousin Elizabeth's throne, Mary's son James became king of England, ending the Tudor line as the first of the Stuart kings.
Related:
Learning from the Dead: Celebrity, Notoriety, and the Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn
Mary isn't an ancestor. I wasn't named for her; there's no particular reason she's one of the figures from history who resonates with me. I don't even like her much, based on the little I know about her. (Fleeing to England's queen to save her life, and intriguing to depose that same queen at the same time--Machiavellian, or stupid. Or both.)
But, having noticed her, I notice things about myself. Perhaps that is one of the uses of biography: discovering myself in other people.
I sometimes say I'm lonely, but it's not just loneliness, but a sense of alienation: just not like the others. Biography in some sense calls out that trait in other people: something about a life that distinguishes the person that had it, something that made them, too, "not like the others."
Reading biography is like participating online, for me. I can explore another mind, with limited risk: things aren't happening in real-time, I can instantly disengage if I don't like what's going on, and I can communicate in the written word, not my mouth which so often says "it" wrong--ie, more bluntly than other people can hear comfortably, or hyperbolically, or just too intensely. Participating online is a little riskier: I am, after all, revealing myself with every comment, in a way that doesn't happen even if someone knows I'm reading a particular biography. Online leaves a visible trail; reading, mostly an invisible one. Only a tiny fraction of what I read makes it into a comment, a blog, a post.
Mary couldn't make up for her lack of common sense with courage, so she turned her assets into a magnificent and effective message, which proved her motto well-chosen: En ma fine et my commencement. In my end is my beginning.
The end of my attempts to hold myself solely responsible for a "willful 'eccentricity'" is my beginning to selectively work out what I can do, based on my evolving sense of the possible, and the courage to do it, based on my character.
In my end is my beginning.
Forty-six years after being executed for attempting to topple her cousin Elizabeth's throne, Mary's son James became king of England, ending the Tudor line as the first of the Stuart kings.
Related:
Learning from the Dead: Celebrity, Notoriety, and the Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn
