A model for a biography

 Lytton Strachey held that biographies should be as long as James Boswell’s Life of Johnson or as short as John Aubrey’s short profiles.

But I like another model: Diogenes Laërtius’s The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.

Diogenes gave an introduction to each philosopher and then let the philosophers speak for themselves. He’d give samples of their sayings and arguments.

The ancient Greek thinkers were big on chreia, which I’d be tempted to translate as “teaching anecdotes.” They were little stories told with a cocked eyebrow. The teller was watching to see if his student was getting the point.

I wish that I had been exposed at an earlier age to a lot of the world’s great thinkers. I think I’d have benefited from a library of small books or pamphlets about important thinkers in history.

A model for such a pamphlet would be something like this:

• A short introduction, putting the subject in context with his or her times.

• A series of quotations, sayings or readings, each no longer than 200 words, that shows what the person thought, believed, valued or fought for. Fifty quotations might be a good standard.

• A short essay on further reading.

There is something admirable in knowing a great deal about a single subject. But far too many people, myself included, simply don’t know anything about some of the people whose thinking shaped the world we live in.

I can imagine a course, something like “Western Civilization” that used to be standard fare for college sophomores, taught as a series of biographies. I’d still like to take that course.