The Observer is Always in the Story
On Memoir, Memory, and the Limits of Objectivity
Not long ago, I reviewed Lauren Kessler’s Everything Changes Everything, her memoir of walking the Camino Francés, the ancient 500-mile pilgrimage that begins in the south of France, crosses northern Spain, and concludes at Santiago de Compostela. Kessler undertook the journey after losing both her husband and her daughter within the span of eight months. My review was later published in the Eugene Weekly (still in existence after 44 years as an actual print newspaper!).
Now, about four months after the book’s publication, Kessler has posted an essay on her Substack titled “The Facts of Memory.” In it, she reflects on the challenges of writing a memoir, a genre that differs from the nonfiction books that established her reputation. As a journalist and nonfiction writer, she has spent her career pursuing facts, verifying accounts, and trying to get the story right. Memoir, however, asks something different of a writer.
The essay explores the uneasy relationship between memory and accuracy. Kessler describes the steps she took to check her recollections against documents, conversations, and other sources, while also acknowledging the unavoidable role of memory in shaping any personal narrative. Reading it, I was struck by her wrestling with questions that have occupied researchers, historians, and writers for a very long time. She invited readers to respond, and I found myself wanting to join the conversation. Here is what I wrote…
Hi Lauren,
This essay resonated with me, though perhaps not in exactly the way you intended.
My academic training was in qualitative and interpretive research. For my doctoral dissertation, I spent several years studying the social world of a college fraternity, conducting interviews, reviewing documents, attending events, and attempting to understand how members made meaning of their experiences. Early in that work, I abandoned the idea that I could somehow stand outside the story as a detached observer. I brought my own history, assumptions, and experiences to the project, and the best I could do was acknowledge them and make them visible to readers.
Because of that background, I really loved reading this discussion of memoir and nonfiction. We both seem to agree that all accounts of human experience are filtered through the observer. Where you see a tension between memoir and nonfiction, though, I tend to see a continuum. Even the most conscientious reporter or researcher makes choices about what to notice, what to include, what to emphasize, and what meaning to draw from the material. Those choices are never entirely objective.
In fact, one of the things I noted in my review of Everything Changes Everything was that I experienced it not only as a memoir but almost as a form of ethnography. You were documenting a journey, certainly, but you were also observing and interpreting a social and emotional world. The subject happened to be grief rather than a culture or community, but the process, and result, felt surprisingly familiar.
Where I think your essay raises an important point is in distinguishing between subjectivity and memory. Subjectivity does not trouble me very much. Memory, well, is an entirely more complicated matter. Human beings reconstruct the past rather than retrieve it intact, and I understand why that creates discomfort for anyone whose professional life has been grounded in nonfiction reporting.
Still, as a reader, what I ultimately trusted in your book was not the impossibility of perfect recall but the honesty and integrity of the effort. Without even much caring, I imagined that you were doing exactly what you describe in your author’s note: consulting documents, checking memories, talking with others, and rendering events as faithfully as possible.
Perhaps that is why I was struck by this essay as sounding almost apologetic. To me, the power of your memoir lies not in overcoming subjectivity but in embracing it. The book succeeds because it offers a deeply observed and thoughtfully interpreted account of lived experience. I don’t see that as a weakness of memoir. I see it as one of its greatest strengths.
Thanks for giving us all something to think about!
The Observer Effect
Can You Hear Me Now?
Here’s a rather timeless question: If a tree falls in a lonely forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? This issue has engaged philosophers for centuries and has given rise to considerable scholarly debate.
Lately I have begun to wonder whether the internet has produced a modern version of a similar philosophical problem, specifically with regard to blogging. If a person writes essays that remain virtually unread, does the blog really exist?
One might imagine that such a question could be addressed, at least somewhat marginally, with data. We live in the age of analytics, after all. Somewhere inside the mysterious machinery of the internet, numbers are quietly crunched: page views, visitor counts, geographic locations, and other tidy bits of data gradually accumulate in the background. Naturally, I occasionally check the available statistics here on Musings.
What I find here can best be described as modest evidence of human life. Sometimes one of my posts appears to have attracted three visitors. Two of those visits are almost certainly me, returning to see whether a typo escaped my notice before I published. The third might represent an actual reader. Or possibly a search engine robot conducting routine surveillance of the digital landscape.
But every now and then the analytics reveal something more mysterious. A recent visitor with an IP address from the Seychelles, for example. I try to imagine this person: someone on a small island in the Indian Ocean who has paused long enough to read a reflective essay about time, memory, or late-life philosophy written by a retired higher-ed guy in Oregon. It is a pleasant thought. Unfortunately, of course, it is most likely a bot.
These observations suggest that the deeper philosophical issue may lie elsewhere. René Descartes famously attempted to anchor human existence in a single undeniable truth: Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. The act of thinking itself confirmed the existence of the thinker.
Modern physics introduces yet another wrinkle. In quantum mechanics, the Uncertainty Principle suggests that the act of observation influences what is being observed. At the smallest scales of reality, the observer and the observed become entangled in curious ways. The observer becomes part of the phenomenon.
All of this raises an unsettling possibility for bloggers: perhaps a post does not fully exist until someone reads it.
For the modern blogger, then, a similar formulation might present itself: Scribo, ergo sum. I write, therefore I am.
But writing on the internet introduces a complication Descartes never had to consider. Descartes lived in an era when publishing assumed an audience. In our era, it is entirely possible to write something, place it carefully on a beautifully designed website — yes, I am talking about TechnoMonk’s Musings here — and discover that the universe has responded with a deafening silence.
This raises a subtle question. If writing is placed before the world but no one encounters it, what exactly has occurred? Is the blog an act of communication, or merely a private journal that just happens to possess a URL?
Perhaps the older philosophical puzzle offers a clue. A tree falling in the forest still disturbs the air, shakes the ground, and settles into the soil whether anyone happens to be standing nearby to hear the sound. The event takes place regardless of observation.
So let’s consider this: Writing may work much the same way. Thoughts take shape. Words accumulate. A small archive of a life gradually forms, essay by essay. Whether the audience is large, small, or occasionally located in the Seychelles may be only an incidental matter.
Descartes had certainty: Cogito, ergo sum.
I think, therefore I am.
Physicists have uncertainty; and so do I. Scribo, ergo sum.
I write, therefore I might be?
Whether anyone can hear me now is another question entirely.
Soundtrack Suggestion
I can see clearly now, the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-shiny day
It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-shiny day
I think I can make it now, the pain is gone
All of the bad feelings have disappeared
Here is the rainbow I've been prayin' for
It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-shiny day
(“I Can See Clearly Now” — Johnny Nash)
Meditations on Time
Here I am, at age 78, seemingly surrounded by stories about time. These stories naturally have a way of turning my thoughts toward how short my own time may be.
I just reread a novel in which every adult on the planet receives a box containing a string that reveals exactly how long they will live. And I’m recalling the television comedy about a moral accounting system that tracks a person’s life here on Earth. Finally, there’s the recent film that imagines we get to choose the precise form our eternity will take.
I did not set out to braid these snippets of our popular culture together. They braided themselves. At this age, time insists on being the subject.
The reminders are constant. Obituary columns, for one. My personal calendar, for another, which now includes far more medical appointments than it once did. Routine blood work. MRI, CT and DEXA scans. Follow-ups, with each visit carrying the distinct possibility that this will be the one where the doctor pauses too long before speaking. Most of the time the news is ordinary. “See you in six months.” But the suspense never quite disappears.
In Nikki Erlick’s 2022 novel The Measure, a mid-life character suggests that a string long enough to reach age eighty would count as good news. When I read that passage, I felt a small jolt. Eighty no longer feels like a distant horizon. It is a number that is uncomfortably close.
If I opened my box today, I would automatically have a long string. The real question would be: how much longer? A year? Five years? Ten? More? Though If I died today, surely no one would lament that I was gone before my time.
All of which leads to other concerns. How many more years would I want if they are shadowed by increasing pain — or other physical or mental decline? Longevity, at this stage, is not automatically the goal. There are conditions.
The Good Place, the four-season television series originally airing on NBC (and now available on Peacock), begins with a moral scoring system; every human action or interaction earns positive or negative points. An endless array of cosmic accountants supposedly keeps track of these tallies someplace up there in the sky, and when you die your final count decides your destiny. It is morality, and judgment day, rendered as a dispassionate spreadsheet.
At 78, that premise feels less like satire and more like a quiet audit. I find myself reviewing my own ledger. Have I been good? Not necessarily accomplished. Nor productive. But good?
My entries must be mixed. I have lived and loved imperfectly. I have hurt people I did not intend to hurt. There are relationships that did not endure. Some ended gently. Others did not. Even now there is sadness attached to those chapters, a sense that certain conversations might have gone differently if I had been wiser, braver or simply more skilled.
I sometimes wonder whether those endings count against me, or whether they merely show that I kept trying to connect and sometimes failed.
The show ultimately dismantles its point system, though. Life, it suggests, is far too entangled for simple math. Growth matters more than totals; it matters more than being flawless.
What lingers for me now is the series’ ending. Even paradise becomes hollow if it stretches on forever. In the final season, the characters are offered an exit. They step through one last door when they feel complete. Eternity with no ending, the show suggests, flattens meaning.
So, I wonder: How, ultimately, will I measure my existence? Will there ever be a time when will I feel complete?
Those questions followed me into the 2025 film Eternity, now on Apple TV, where humanity is invited to choose the form one’s forever will take. The idea sounds appealing at first. Pick your paradise. A tropical beach, for example. Perfect weather. Endless calm.
But what would that mean after a thousand years? Ten thousand? How could any single scene, no matter how beautiful, sustain significance without limit? Without scarcity?
Part of what makes a late-life conversation more vivid is precisely that it may not be repeated endlessly. Scarcity is what gives weight to life’s ordinary moments.
If I knew the precise length of my string, maybe I would live differently. I might rush to repair what remains frayed. Or I might grow cautious, conserving energy. Uncertainty leaves me in between. Aware of the limit, but not of its measure. Isn’t it that uncertainty that keeps life from becoming either frantic or complacent?
If there is a ledger somewhere, I hope it records effort. That it shows I kept revising myself. That I tried to mend what I could. That I did not stop growing simply because the horizon drew closer.
I am not eager to open the box. And I am not certain I want a tropical eternity with no horizon. I only know that the ticking is audible now. Doctor visits. Quiet evenings. Old relationships to ponder. Meditations on time.
Age 78. Still adding to the ledger.
Poetry Selection: The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
-Mary Oliver
In Memoriam
Thomas A. Schwandt
Thomas A. Schwandt was a teacher in the most profound sense of that word. When he died right before Christmas, at age 77, the news felt to me like the quiet closing of a chapter that began more than thirty years ago.
I received my Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1995, with Tom as my dissertation director. I learned last November, just after his birthday, that he was ill. Even with that knowledge, the report of his passing landed heavily.
In absolutely no uncertain terms, Tom was the center of my IU graduate-student experience.
Tom began his academic life in English literature before moving toward theology, philosophy, and ultimately evaluation. That trajectory makes perfect sense in retrospect. His work was always animated by questions of meaning and moral judgment. My own undergraduate training was in chemistry, a discipline that demands intellectual discipline, analytic precision, respect for evidence, and humility before complexity. Tom helped me see that those habits of mind need not be abandoned when one enters qualitative inquiry; they must simply be redirected. Under his guidance, rigor became not merely technical exactness, but careful thinking about values, human judgment, and what our conclusions require of us.
His courses in interpretive inquiry and evaluation were, without reservation, the most formative of my time at Indiana. He did not merely perform scholarship; he practiced it carefully and deliberately. His classroom was marked by deep, open-ended questions that slowed thinking down: What does it mean to know? What is the validity of this knowledge claim? What are the ethical and moral responsibilities when working with human subjects? He made it clear that evaluation is not a technical exercise conducted from a position of detached neutrality. It is a value-laden and political practice. The task of the researcher or evaluator is not to eliminate values but to expose them, examine them, and reason together about them honestly.
When he agreed to direct my dissertation, I felt incredibly fortunate as well as challenged. Drafts were returned with precise criticism and unmistakable encouragement. He expected clarity because he assumed I was capable of it. That kind of steady confidence alters a scholar’s sense of himself, whether he is twenty-five or in midlife, as I was.
My career moved toward higher education administration rather than the scholarly life Tom exemplified. Yet his questions accompanied me into leadership roles. From policy development and implementation, to budget deliberations, to the never-ending personnel conflicts, I often heard echoes of his voice: What does this mean? Whose voices are present or absent? Given what we know, what should we do now? What is the right and responsible way to proceed?
When Tom retired in 2015, we exchanged old-school, handwritten notes. In mine, I told him that, with four degrees earned across four different decades, I had experienced dozens, perhaps hundreds, of classroom leaders. Students remember their great teachers, try to forget the terrible ones, and grow hazy about most of the rest. “You,” I wrote, “were in a category by yourself. You were not only among the greats, you were simply the best. In the world of academia, I tell people I got to work with a rock star while doing my doctoral work at IU.”
His reply captured his character perfectly: “… it may make you feel good to know that I doubt I have ever failed to mention your Ph.D. thesis in every qualitative methodology class I have taught! … I have always felt that the real rock stars were the students that I had the great fortune to work with.”
That generosity, that instinct to redirect praise, was quintessential Tom. He saw teaching not as performance but as stewardship.
When I read his obituary, and later the tribute from the European Evaluation Society, with their descriptions of wisdom, integrity, faith, and service, I recognized immediately the same man I had known in front of classrooms decades ago.
Now, in retirement, as I concentrate on reading, writing, and reflection, I recognize how much of my intellectual architecture in later life was formed under his guidance. If there is any seriousness to my thinking, any respect for complexity and moral responsibility, it surely can be traced back to his mentorship.
In 1995, I acknowledged and thanked him as an incredible gentleman and scholar. Thirty some years later, I understand those words even more fully.
I remain deeply grateful that I had the privilege to be his student and colleague.
His questions remain with me. Still.
Soundtrack Suggestion
Across the morning sky,
All the bird are leaving,
Ah, how can they know it’s time for them to go?
Before the winter fire,
We’ll still be dreaming.
I do not count the time
Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
(“Who Knows Where the Time Goes” – Sandy Denny)
Update on March 11, 2026:
Here’s the link to the video for the Service of Witness to the Resurrection, held for Tom on February 21, 2026, at the First Presbyterian Church in Bloomington, Indiana.
Poetry Selection: Remember Me
To the living, I am gone,
To the sorrowful, I will never return,
To the angry, I was cheated,
But to the happy, I am at peace,
And to the faithful, I have never left.
I cannot speak, but I can listen.
I cannot be seen, but I can be heard.
So as you stand upon a shore gazing at a beautiful sea,
As you look upon a flower and admire its simplicity,
Remember me.
Remember me in your heart:
Your thoughts, and your memories,
Of the times we loved,
The times we cried,
The times we fought,
The times we laughed.
For if you always think of me, I will never have gone.
Margaret Mead
What Is It All About?
I am now in my 77th year and quite frequently, in this mostly-retired life I’m living, I wonder how to make the most meaning of my remaining days. I say “mostly retired” because back in 2019, after five years with no earned income, I decided to seek part-time work that would supplement my various and sundry (i.e., relatively-modest) retirement-income streams. So, in the last five years, and because I have a wide range of skills, I have worked three successive, different jobs on our local community college campus. It has been a valuable experience, so far, and keeps both my mind and body active.
Retirement, though, is nothing like I imagined – that is, if I thought about it much at all. I never really did have a coherent “retirement strategy,” as we are encouraged to do. Rather, my approach seemed to be: to work as long as I can and then see where I was in “old age.” You would be right in concluding that this is not really the most prudent game plan. And, as it turned out, I spent a considerable portion of my life pursuing multiple academic degrees, which significantly cut into my ability to put away any kind of really-comfortable, old-age nest egg. (Student loans played a big part in that, I have to admit; I was paying them off until age 66. It seems I missed the whole “forgiveness” scenario by about three decades.)
