I read this story once, about a man who began a very large picture, and therein was a kind of map for example, hills, horses, streams, fishes, and woods and towers and men and all sorts of things. When the day of his death came, he found he had been making a picture of himself. That is the case with most writers.
For example, V.S. Naipaul's A Way in The world, each chapter, when considered shining, is relatively straightforwardly biographical, but when read as a whole, refracts brilliant, harsh light back upon the author.
In a larger sense, all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it. The real question is this massive personal narrative that constructs the self and colors our lives, does it yield only fictions? Or, among the fictions of the self, the masks and the versions of the self, that it yields, are there any that are truer than others? How do I know when I have the truth about myself?
We don't see the world. We make it up.
The final orbit is oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of their own soul?
