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Quote by Barry Lopez

“It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one's time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay -- a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory.”

Quote by Barry Lopez

Work

About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

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Author

Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez, born on January 6, 1945, is an American author known for his exploration of nature, culture, and the relationship between humans and the natural world. more

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“We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations.”

“The communication function of modern writers is akin to the ancient role fulfilled by tribal shamans. All writers ultimately perform a shamanistic role in society; their mythmaking voices speak to us from the underworld after their passage to the other side. Writers place themselves in a trance-like state where their unconscious mind dictates to them what to write.”

“Writing and other efforts to produce an enduring piece of artwork is a gallant response to the prospect of death. Every person knows that they must die, and consequently people build elaborate symbolic defenses mechanism to shield themselves from knowledge of their impermanence. Every person possesses autonomy of the will, the ability to choose how to conduct their life. The freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless; it provides a person with no sense of meaning and supplies no purpose to life because a mere collection of objects will not transcend their physical demise. An artist does not deny their impermanence but embraces the prospect of their death by laboring to create a monument of their existence that will survive their expiry.”

“The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person’s personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person’s sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author’s own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person.”

“Writing a personal essay or memoir addresses how a person thinks and behaves in the context of society’s prevailing moral and ethical codes, informal rules, laws, and customs. A self-ethnographer emphasis what he or she considers important regarding how people perceive and categorize the world, their meaning for behavior, how they imagine and explain things, and ascertaining what has meaning for them. Expository writing, a discursive examination of a broad field of subjects, is one method of cohering the dimensions of a person’s emic and etic thoughts and a linked series of memorable events into a unified personal ideology how to live a purposeful life. In cultural anthropology, the emic approach focuses on what people of a local culture think and how they interpret events whereas the etic approach takes a more objective view of how an outsider evaluates the behavior and customs of a culture. Usage of both emic and etic analysis provides the richest description of a cultural or a society in which the personal essayist operates within.”

“Autobiographical writing stands as lasting memorial for enduring the travails of an earthly life. Writing is an apt technique to score our storyline into the annuals of time. To endure a mortal life is merely a transitory experience whereas writing about how one lived is an internalized exposition of what it means to be human. Writing is an external exhibition injecting the author into the world’s consciousness.”

“Personal essay writing that incites the mind and instigates personal growth involves examination and re-examination, a process of noticing and reflecting upon what a person perceives. Essayistic writing is an osmotic process wherein a person intuitively absorbs information and ideas, allows inchoate thoughts to gestate in the unconscious mind, and then consciously places the emergent strands of language and logic into an orderly and expressive format.”