Gusorf autobiography

Question 1

the concern, which seems natural to us, to turn back on one’s life

Answer 1

in order to narrate it, is not all that universal

Question 2

the man who takes delight in thus drawing his own image believes himself as the centre of a living space:

Answer 2

I count my experience as significant to the world, and my death will leave the world incomplete

Question 3

In narrating my life, I give witness of myself even from beyond my death and so can

Answer 3

preserve this precious capital that ought not to disappear

Question 4

the author of an auto-biography gives a sort of relief to this image by reference to the environment with its existence;

Answer 4

he looks at himself being and delights in being looked at- he calls himself a witness for himself; others he calls a witness for what is irreplaceable in his presence

Question 5

throughout most of human history, the individual does not oppose himself to all others; he does not feel himself

Answer 5

to exist outside of others, and still less against others, but very much with others in an interdependent existence that asserts its rhythms everywhere in the community

Question 6

no one is the rightful possessor of his life or his death; lives are so thoroughly entangles that each of them has

Answer 6

its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere

Question 7

community life unfolds like a great drama, with its climatic moments

Answer 7

originally fixed by the gods being repeated from age to age

Question 8

each man thus appears as the possessor of a role, already performed again by ancestors and to

Answer 8

be performed again by dependents

Question 9

the number of roles is limited and this is expressed by a

Answer 9

limited number fo names

Question 10

theories of eternal recurrence, accepted in various guises as dogma by the majority of the great cultures of antiquity, fix attention on that which remains

Answer 10

not which passes

Question 11

“that which is” according to the wisdom of Ecclesiastes

Answer 11

“is that which has been, and there is nothing new under the sun”

Question 12

Auto biography becomes possible only under certain

Answer 12

metaphysical preconditions

Question 13

the man who takes the trouble to tell of himself knows that the present differs from the past and that it will not

Answer 13

be repeated in the future; he has become more aware of differences than of similarities; given the constant change, given the uncertainty of events and of men

Question 14

he believes it a useful and valuable hing to fix his own image so that he can

Answer 14

be certain it will not disappear like all things in this world

Question 15

history would be the memory of a humanity heading toward unforeseeable goals

Answer 15

struggling against the breakdown of forms and beings. each man matters to the world

Question 16

this historic personage now appears, and biography, taking its place alongside monuments, inscriptions, statues, is

Answer 16

one manifestation of his desire to endure in man’s memory

Question 17

but biography, which thus established as a literary genre, provides only an exterior presentation of great persons

Answer 17

reviewed and corrected by the demands of propaganda and by the general sense of the age

Question 18

the historian finds himself removed from his model by the passage of Time - at least, this is most often true

Answer 18

and it is always true that he is a great social distance from his model

Question 19

he is conscious of performing a public and official function similar to that of the artist who sculpts or paints

Answer 19

the likeness of a powerful man of the day

Question 20

he considers himself a great person, worthy of men’s remembrance

Answer 20

even though he is only more or less an obscure intellectual

Question 21

our interest turned from public to private history

Answer 21

alongside the great men who act out of official history of humanity, there are obscure men who conduct the campaign of their spiritual life within their breast, carrying on silent battles whose ways and means, whose triumphs and reversals also merit being preserved in the universal memory

Question 22

if exterior space- the stage of the world- is a light clear space where everyones behaviour, movements and motives are quite plain on first sight,

Answer 22

interior space is shadowy in its very essence

Question 23

the subject who seizes in himself for object inverts the natural direction of attention; it appears

Answer 23

that in acting thus he violates certain taboos of human nature

Question 24

nature did not force the encounter of man with his own reflection

Answer 24

as it is as if he tied to prevent his reflection from appearing

Question 25

the invention of the mirror would seem to have disrupted human experience, especially from that moment when the mediocre metal

Answer 25

plates that were used in antiquity gave way at the end of the Middle Ages to silver- blacked mirrors produced by Venetian technique

Question 26

from that moment, the image in the mirror became a part of the scene of life, and psychoanalysts have brought out the major role

Answer 26

that this image plays in the child’s gradual consciousness of his own personality

Question 27

from the age of sis months, the human infant s is particularly interested in

Answer 27

this reflection of himself, which would leave an animal indifferent

Question 28

little by little the infant discovers an essential aspect of hi identity: he distinguishes that which is without from his own from within

Answer 28

he sees himself as another among others; he is situated in social space, at the heart of which he will become capable of reshaping his own reality.