Читать книгу The Inventors - Peter Selgin - Страница 15

I HARDLY KNEW MY FATHER. HOWEVER KIND AND (IN HIS way) loving, he kept a distance between himself and all others, including me. In other ways I’m so much like him that to speak of distances between us is, if not altogether absurd, irrelevant. In a way, his death only brought us closer by eliminating the false dichotomy suggested by our separate bodies. He was as much my twin as my brother, maybe more so. I can’t mourn him without feeling as though I’m embracing a solipsism, like I’m mourning myself.

That I knew (and still know) very little about my father’s past doesn’t lessen this feeling at all. If anything the mystery augments and strengthens it, since the people we know least well are ourselves. If we think we know ourselves better than other people do, it’s because we have access to more memories than they do. We know our stories better – so we tell ourselves, though in so doing we forget that they’re stories and not the truth, which is much harder to grasp.

The best if not the only way to discover ourselves is through others.

The discreet subject of any biography is the biographer.

From ELECTRIC MOTOR: “This invention relates to an electric motor of simplified construction. The invention has particular reference to an electric motor which requires one or more simple toroidal coils and no complicated commutator. The coils may be fabricated prior to assembly and can easily be removed from the motor at any time for repair.” From Patent No. 3,387,151