Words Worth Noting - September 14, 2023

“David S. Muzzey put the problem well when he compared the individual to the waist of an hour-glass, standing ‘at the apex of a pyramid whose base broadens downward through descendants at the apex of a pyramid whose base broadens upward through ancestors’. In Muzzey’s image, every historically significant man is ‘focal’, gathering the experience of the past into himself and sending forth ‘widening rays of influence’ into the future. ‘The task of the biographer,’ he concluded, is ‘to calculate the resultant of the forces’, which consist of the personality of the subject and ‘the problems of the times in which he lived’.”

John A. Garratty The Nature of Biography