When one writes anything it is never specifically for oneself. Even though we may say it is, and even the most honest of men have said it; however, there is still the realization and the desire to be read. Even if one is at the same time afraid to be read, and wishes to destroy his work; which, has been the occasion of many great writers and almost the fate of many great classics. Nonetheless, there is a desire in people who write to truly write; even if they know that what they write will not be known too many, if anyone. Perhaps, it is because they are writing to be read by themselves at a later date? Maybe it is a desire to confess and tell their story; to re-live their past experiences as they write it? And thus we come to the two-fold purpose of writing. It is to open yourself up to others for yourself. For all great writing, that will never get old and never be timely, this is what is needed in the writer. The writing must be you yourself, and when you write something there must be a piece of your soul in that writing that you might find frightful for someone else to read, and yet it is something that you wish others to know about you. This is what is untimely in something that is written.
There are writers who decieve (entertain), they do not write of themselves or ‘confess’, they tell stories where only the most superficial parts of their being (soul) are visible. These works are timely, and they are not written as a means to reach out to people and show them what is truly inside them, but to decieve them about themselves, or to not talk about themselves at all, and just tell a good story that follows a common formula for fiction. The feeling the writer feels towards these writings is just as impersonal as a business man towards a good report that he has just sent off to his boss or a student who just finished writing an essay forced on him by his teacher. This is what is timely in writing.
Thus writers of autobiographies can fall into these two categories. One wishes to show himself as he is to himself, his friends, and the public. The other wishes to show himself as he is not to the public (perhaps even to himself and his friends). The former wishes to achieve a certain form of immortality for his life, by writing it on paper and letting it be remembered for years after he himself, who had these memories, has died. The latter wishes for immediate fame, it is a tool for his own image and thus false and vain, and he may even wish to be remembered after he is dead, perhaps imagining that he might hear these praises?
If a person who writes an autobiography is young and of a noble heart he does so to ‘get his bearings straight’. He uses it as a focus to see where he should go and what he should do in the future. If one is older and at the end of one’s life it is that desire to re-live one’s life and to achieve that form of immortality that I stated above.
