“What a little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words!” he offers at one point. “His real life is in his head and is known to none but himself…” If this internal monologue were to be written, he suggests, prefiguring Leopold Bloom by 20 years, “every day would make a book of eighty thousand words, three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written…”
You should all be very very VERY glad that I don’t spew it all out every day. I think, despite my father’s glum misgivings on the subject, I’m the very soul of discretion … at least sometimes.