{"id":471,"date":"2022-12-04T12:09:19","date_gmt":"2022-12-04T12:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/?p=471"},"modified":"2022-12-04T12:09:19","modified_gmt":"2022-12-04T12:09:19","slug":"who-is-trystan-lewis-who-am-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/2022\/12\/04\/who-is-trystan-lewis-who-am-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Trystan Lewis? Who Am I?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Much of The Dark Trilogy<\/a><\/em> deals with my past. A while ago I read, and felt that I had to respond to, a blog post – Clearing Out<\/a> – by Andrew Green, one-time National Librarian of Wales. He had written:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019ve been clearing out.  Clearing cupboards in the front room, full of books, files, magazines, papers, photos, games, maps and other detritus.  Many of them have been there since the cupboards and the bookshelves above them were built some thirty years ago…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cupboards have yielded plenty of surprises. Some things I\u2019d entirely forgotten I\u2019d kept. Funeral services of long-dead aunts and godmothers… Some things have been easy enough to discard… But between the can-go\u2019s and the must keep\u2019s there\u2019s another class of object I worry about, the borderline cases.  Take this newspaper article with an image of me and other hopeful cyclists about to set off from Cardiff City Hall to Aberystwyth to raise money for Nicaragua. If it goes, so does all evidence of me as I was then.  But that raises a serious problem \u2013 a problem, you might say, in the philosophy of time, or of consciousness.  Who was I then?  And I am the same person now as I was then? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

By chance, almost exactly a year earlier, the poet and writer Helen May Williams had written in her blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“When I was seven years old, I remember writing an essay about \u2018Who am I?\u2019 In it, I pondered whether the person I was last year was the same as the person I was now, and whether that person would be the same a year hence. I still don\u2019t have the answer to that question.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

My response to Andrew Green – I think I thought that it doesn’t matter whether you are a different person (better\/worse!) now to the person you were then: both histories of you are equally important and go to making up your life – was:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I am the last person to talk about de-cluttering\u2026 I keep everything!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is another side to your archive. I have had so many conversations with relatives \u2013 my sister, my sisters-in-law, etc \u2013 wishing that they (and I) had paid more attention to the stories that our\/their parents told during the years when they were alive. So many attempts to identify people in photographs! So much history lost! To the extent that I am currently working on an annotated and illustrated timeline starting with my grandparents to pass on to my grandsons\u2026 who may or may not be interested. Now, or ever! I had thought it near finished. But, alas! Your piece suggests a further annotation: \u2018Objects\u2019 [in my cottage] \u2013 the pair of china figures, the pewter\u2026 much of which came from my grandfather\u2019s house\u2026 or the fake fur coat I bought in Liverpool in the sixties!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Spare a thought for the generations to follow who may wonder why Grandad had a\u2026 or what Grandad did!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

… and what he was like when he was younger… was he the same man then as the man they came to know?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Much of The Dark Trilogy deals with my past. A while ago I read, and felt that I had to respond to, a blog post – Clearing Out – by Andrew Green, one-time National Librarian of Wales. He had written: I\u2019ve been clearing out.  Clearing cupboards in the front room, full of books, files, magazines, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[35,19,47,14,22],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essay","category-fiction","tag-autobiographies","tag-chris-armstrong","tag-memory","tag-the-dark-trilogy","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":475,"href":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions\/475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curatedlines.online\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}