Other people’s memoirs allow one to commune with one’s self and to relate that self and its experience with others.They teach the ways and how’s of our own life lessons as reflected by and refracted through the lens of perhaps distant compatriots. Utopian notions allow extension and expansion of memoir in design of the future.At least to some degree one’s notions of an appropriate or salutary future grow from one’s experience and are therefore embedded in memoir.According to the theory of the leisure class the memory of privileged personal experience can yield hopes for utopia, or a future quite at variance that experience. Lyman T. Sa rgent, editor of Utopian Studies Journal, says that,
The word utopia, as coined by [Thomas] More [in 1516], means nowhere and implies nothing relevant to the quality of that nowhere. Utopia may be used as the general term covering all the various classes of utopian literature. Eutopia--although the word has unfortunately fallen out of favor--or the positive utopia refer to presentations of good places. Dystopia or the negative utopia refers to presentations of bad places (Sargent, Lyman T., British And American Utopian Literature, 1516-1975, pp. x-xi, Boston: G. K. Hall, c1979). The intention here is to focus on Eutopia and leave dystopia to science fiction writers.How can we turn our memories of past experience into desirable futures? Although mass policy creation is future oriented it is derived from the combined personal experience of individual policy makers.However, because it applies to the larger citizenry those personal experiences are relevant to us all even though they are often unarticulated publicly.Biography and autobiography, normally written as death approaches, have been almost the only means by which a populace can ascertain an official’s personal information.But memoir offers a new venue because it is less formal, covers periods as short as moments in a person’s life and can be made available at any age and certainly long before a person’s impending death.Memoirs are also more about the interpretations and emotions aroused by events rather than their academic substance.And, while biography abjures focus on the writer’s life and reactions, a memoir written about a close associate almost requires that the author’s thoughts and feelings be revealed.A memoir is not objective.It is always a subjective document.
How might a memoir by Aldous Huxley, for example, on his mother’s death from cancer inform understanding of his dystopian novel, Brave New World or the eutopian one The Island? It does seem clear that his father’s trade as a biologist had influence. Huxley biographies tell us of this tragic death when he was only 14 years old, but did the feelings aroused impact either work? Would a memoir of this event, intimate portrait that memoir is, rather than a biography that lumps it together with other events, have enlightened us as to how and why he constructed his images of the future?The goal of the Memoir And Utopia site is to construct a favorable future based upon intimate reflection.