Most of why I hate audiobooks — despite enjoying them moderately often, since they fill a really particular function my driving life — is that I can’t then go reference anything in them. My comprehension is poor. I flip through Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence often because it’s full of really great insights, but it’s written with the transparency of a brick wall. By the time I understood anything being said, my brain lacks the macronutrients to encode anything. That’s why keeping a reading journal or Google doc matters to me.
So like, there’s this section of Colson Whitehead’s The Noble Hustle, which I was reading in January and resulted in a blog post I’m still very happy with, but also I haven’t finished it because it’s a damn audiobook and I can’t leave it out on my desk to remind me I’m reading it. Anyway. There’s this section. Whitehead describes his tendency wait out a few bad hands, to “bide” as he calls it, rather than get jumpy and bet big on nothing. He also describes himself describing that tendency to his poker tutor. “The biding thing” becomes an important part of his “personal mythology.”
I think a lot now about personal mythology. It’s an identity tool, it’s a navigation tool. It helps us make sense of why we’re good at some things and bad at other things.
I excelled at competetive trivia in high school because, if I read a poem, I could remember most of the lines. Not off the top of my head. But if someone said “jocund company,” I’d be like “oh, that’s the daffodil one.” Once the very first word of a question was “felicity,” and I buzzed because I remembered something I had read about Jeremy Bentham’s theory of felicitous calculus. This made some Catholic schoolkids from the opposing team very mad at me.
Anyway, that memory thing became core to my personal mythology.
On the other hand, I’ve always been sorrowfully dismal at remembering personal details. I can get names alright with a little bit of effort. But if you told me your job, or your plans this weekend, or god forbid your birthday, I really don’t know what to tell you. I probably don’t remember.
So there’s a really nice storyline: my verbal memory is very good, but my personal memory is awful. I bet if I hit the books I could learn some tricks to improve that deficiency. It’s easier, though, to just accept it into the legend I tell myself about myself. Just like I accepted dark undereye circles.
Where it gets messy is when, for example, I accept sleeplessness into my mythology and then cease to be sleepless. I’ve suffered from insomnia on and off for a long time. In the off periods, I get actually stressed that a part of my identity — even an unhealthy one — is gone. Or something like clumsiness, which I think is true about me but which I refuse to accept.
All in all though, I think personal mythologies are necessary and, maybe more important, inevitable. If only to decide how we get to present ourselves to the world.