Curating one’s own collected essays feels like engraving one’s intellectual tombstone.
Evidence
Stuart was thus always more interested, right to the end, in what he might be able to say that would speak to the changing circumstances of the day, rather than in perfecting a selection of his work for the historical record: a task which, in any case, must inevitably have also involved the unnerving recognition that he was being asked, in effect, to help engrave his own intellectual tombstone. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 50
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Resonates with the library/collection scholarship on how authors and collectors shape their afterlives.
- SHARE: Worth sending to a writer or academic friend staring down their own collected-works project.