These are fragments, you say, cracker crumbs, lint in your shirt pocket, dizzy atoms. They’re off the map, off the clock, floating free, spring pollen. That’s the worst of it: there’s nothing selective about biography’s raw data, no sorting machine, no briny episodes underlined in yellow pencil or provided with bristling asterisks-it’s all here, the sweepings and the leavings, the most trivial personal events encoded with history. Biography-it sniffs it out, snorts it up.

Here, to give an example, is Malcolm Brownstone’s birth squawl from fifty-odd years ago, a triple-note yawolll of outrage bubbling up through the humid branches of his infant lungs, and again, yawolll. And the sleepless night he spent, aged twelve, in a rain-soaked tent in the Indian Hills, and also the intensity with which he reads newspapers and promptly forgets most of what he reads, and his dreamy neurotic trick of picking up a spoon and regarding his bent face in the long sad oval of its bowl.

In a future world, in a post-meltdown world, biography may get its hands on the kind of cunning conversion that couples mass and energy. We may learn, for instance, to heat our houses with it, build bigger lasers with its luminous run-off or more concentrated fictive devices.

But for the time being, every narrative scrap is equally honored and dishonored. Everything goes into the same democratic hopper, not excluding the privately performed acts of deceased spinners and weavers, or contemporary ashtray designers and manicurists, or former cubists and cabinet ministers, and young mothers pushing prams and poets who seek to disarm their critics-even these seemingly inconsequential acts enter the biographical aggregation and add to the weight of the universe.

It’s crowded, is it ever crowded! Inside a single biographical unit, there are biographical clouds and biographical shadows, biographical pretexts and strategies and time-buying sophistries and hair-veined rootlets of frazzled memory. Long complex biographies, for example, have been registered and stored for all the ancestors, friends and acquaintances of the Japanese pop singer, who right this minute is strolling in the sunshine down the Champs Élysées wearing a leopard (genuine) jacket and a pair of pale pressed jeans. There are detailed dossiers for each of the twelve girls and twenty-six boys who competed for the state whistling championship in Indianapolis in 1937. Every particular is recorded, and also every possibility and random trajectory, even those, to cite the case of Martä G. and Malcolm B., that have only a partial or wishful existence.