"Twenty-some years ago, I got a Guggenheim grant to write a memoir. I ended up using most of the money to buy a garden tractor."

"I failed for a number of reasons. I don’t feel interesting. I don’t trust my memories (or anyone’s memories) as reliable records of anything—and I have a fear of lying. Nor do I have much documentary material. I’ve never kept a diary or a journal, because I get spooked by addressing no one. When I write, it’s to connect. I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them. Susan Sontag observed that when you have a disease people identify you with it. Fine by me! I could never sustain an expedient 'I' for more than a paragraph. (Do you imagine that writers speak 'as themselves'? No such selves exist.) Playing the Dying Man (Enter left. Exit trapdoor) gives me a persona. It’s a handy mask."

From "The Art of Dying/I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?" by Peter Schjeldahl. Schjeldahl is 77 and dying of lung cancer. This is quite a long essay — about death — but there's a highly enjoyable breeziness about it.

I chose that passage in part because it had a tractor and, then, potatoes. And because I identified with the feeling of being "beset... by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames" and that reminded me of what I was reading about Adam Driver earlier today, that he had "a tendency to try to make things better or drive myself and the other people around me crazy with the things I wanted to change or I wish I could change." I'd said, "I do think there's a great range in how minutely people examine and reexamine their failings and imagined failings."