Konstantin Paustovsky: The Story of a Life

 What am I?  More specifically, what is the "I", any I among us?  It is manifestly not the body, for I continue in the mind even when my body sleeps.  It is not even, as Sartre observes, the mind, for the mind that thinks "I am" cannot be the same I of which it thinks.  That I is the object, not the subject; it is rather a "me".  It is inextricable from the biological and social forces to which it is subjected, and maybe even from the bacteria which inhabit its body.  The only thing that can lay a claim to being the I, the subject, is that gaze which gives attention to one thing and not another.  I have found the metaphor of a finger on a keyboard to be useful:  I am not the keyboard, nor the music which it creates; I am the finger itself. I am the gaze.

Paustovsky masterfully demonstrates here that what is true for the individual philosophically is also true for the author literarily.  The author is as much subject to his body and the society in which he lives as the individual is.  It is only his gaze which is truly his own, and only by observing where and how that gaze falls can we approach understanding.  

Perhaps it is my impulse as a scholar that compels me to take this idea further, and perhaps it is my instinct as a teacher that taxonomizes it for easy consumption and lecture.  At any rate, Paustovsky's mastery and maturity eliminates the background noise, and gazes with such intention that certain functions of that gaze become clear:

• What he attends to: the details that he chooses to observe, out of infinite details that are available.
• What he ignores: those aspects of a scene which might have capture the attention of another author.
• How he judges it: it is in this that Paustovsky is especially judicious.  His descriptions are usually so specific and objective, that the moments he lets an opinion or feeling in are startling and revealing.
• When he turns his gaze inward: it is again the care with which he chooses his moments that make them stand out.  He is not prone to flights of reflection, so when he does it, the reader notices.

These are the only things the writer has to offer, and especially the autobiographer.  Everything else is noise, just as the body, and even the mind are distractions from what is real: the self, which is only a disembodied gaze. An eye for an I.