Different contexts

Susan Cheever

Biography is an exercise in context.

Susan Cheever, E.E. Cummings: A Life

Think about your own life, the home you grew up in, the neighborhood you lived in during your youth, the choices you made, the people you loved,  the defeats you suffered as well as the victories you celebrated, the culture that shaped you. What you look like, where your talents lie and what ailments you suffer from are mostly the result of genetics, but most everything else in your life was influenced by environment, and each of us experiences a somewhat different environment. Or to use Susan Cheever's word, a different context.

She goes on to explain what she means in the above-quoted line: "In writing a life, biographers must create the time in which that life was lived."

Some biographers fail to do this. She observes, without naming names, "Sometime biography looks back in judgment, condemning a subject's action with the advantages of modern knowledge and customs. Sometimes a biographer will try to re-create circumstances in which a subject's action may be understood in a way in which they could not be understood at the time of writing."

In other words, biographers — and also readers of biographies — need to show a little tolerance, a little understanding, a little grace. People of a different time just didn't think the same way you do. For that matter, other people living today don't necessarily think the same way you do. They come from different contexts.