“Who has not played the great game of counter-factual autobiography?” (Simon Barnes, Ten Million Aliens, 2014)

What would my life have looked like if I hadn’t taken up a vacancy job at Roskilde University in 1973? And what if I had stayed in my first marriage? What would have become of me if I had remained in Sweden? A middle-level left-leaning bureaucrat in the environmental administration?

Should we take counter-factual autobiography seriously? Well, as methodological individualists suggest, history and society is made up by the actions of countless individuals. Thus counter-factual history — a respectable branch of history these days — could be said to have its foundations in counter-factual (auto)biography.

My document archive is not only a source for long forgotten thoughts and events. It’s also turned out to be a source for unexpected wealth. When I opened a thin notebook titled ‘Notater 16/3 1976 – 3/4 1976’ I found these four bank notes from 1972. Unfortunately it happened only once.

This post was also published on Facebook (5 October 2015), generating a few comments

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Dedicated much of October 2015 to moral and emotional self-spanking at the highest level. Read more than 40-year-old correspondence, diary entries, draft scripts, etc. from my ten years as a political activist and social analyst in the 1970s. It was even more depressing than reading the letters from the failed relationship.

[Ägnade en stor del av september-oktober 2015 åt moralisk och känslomässig själv-spanking på högsta nivå. Läste mer än 40 år gamla brevväxlingar, dagboksanteckningar, manusutkast m.m. från mina tio år som politisk aktivist och samhällsanalytiker på 1970-talet. Det var mer deprimerande än att läsa breven från de förlista parförhållandena.]

Published on Facebook (25 September 2015) this post generated the following comments:

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In the course of this project, I’ve spent evening after evening recollecting memories from my childhood and school years. I have jotted down pages of notes with several hundreds of flashes of recollections of places, objects and atmospheres, and sometimes people and feelings (what I call unit memories) from age 4-5 to age 18.

It strikes me that all these memories are episodic, i.e., they are about singular events and they haven’t at any time come forth in any particular chronological order. In other words, my memory is not organised as a narrative.

I guess I could — later on, in writing — reconstruct all these episodic unit memories in some kind of narrative order. But why should I do so? Reconstructing them narratively would, I think, be to violate my phenomenological experience of my own past. What would I actually gain from turning the actual, apparently unstructured, episodic order into a structured narrative?

Are there any of my knowledgeable philosophical / psychoanalytic / biographical / phenomenological / psychological / literary friends out there who could help me?

An almost idential version was published on Facebook, 9 September 2015 and generated a very large number of very interesting comments: Read More

As Søren Kierkegaard once famously said, life is lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards.

I was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1946, right after the Second World War. Throughout my 50 years of academic life I’ve been busy, busy, busy. I have continuously explored new intellectual and scholarly vistas; like a fox I have jumped from one project to the other. I have rarely had time to, or interest in, looking back on my earlier life.

Now, 69 years later and with a professional career as an historian of science behind me, I still want to live forwards. Not least because I want to enjoy and foster my new brood of kids (here’s the youngest, he will be five years old next February).

But hopefully he and his two older sisters will benefit also from their father’s newly acquired interest in looking back on his career, his joys and sorrows, his few successes and way too many mistakes and lost opportunities. Although I think they should of course focus on living forwards for decades, they may nevertheless in some future time acknowledge the value of the old Greek notion of γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know thyself).

The idea for this website dawned upon me one day last summer. I had decided to leave my job as Director of the Medical Museion in Copenhagen after 15 years, and suddenly I felt an urge to take stock before going on to the next — yet somewhat underdefined — phase in life

The title ‘Life Recollected’ reflects the various intellectual and scholarly aims of and interests behind the site. I will get back to these aims and interests in later postings, and will also treat them more systematically in the static pages listed in the menu at top of this page.

Published in a shorter version on Facebook 30 June 2015, generating a few comments:

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