Chapter 1 (1959-1965): Early Years: New York, Stockholm, and Durham, North Carolina
Chapter 2 (1966-1972): Elementary School in North Carolina and California
Chapter 4 (1980-1986): My Jewish Explorations
Chapter 5 (1987-1993): The Graduate Student Years in Los Angeles
Chapter 6 (1994-2000): Marriage, Fatherhood, Research and Too Much Los Angeles
Chapter 7 (2001-2007): Life in Oregon
Chapter 8 (2008-2015): Life Goes On
William Shakespeare,
As You Like It,
(Act II, Scene 7)
All the world´s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse´s arms.
And then the whinning school-boy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woful ballad
Made to his mistress´ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon´s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin´d,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose well sav´d a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends his strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Documented Life started back around 2001 as a photodocumentary of my life, a little game to see if I could find one picture from each year of my life. Then it became more biographical because I felt the pictures required some kind of explanation. Now I no longer include much biographical information here because, really, it's not very interesting and have not felt that need to explain for a long time. Instead, I am putting it in a book for my kids. However, I do like the idea of a life-long photographic record of one life, and the one I've created may cover an unusually long time span as these things go. Along the way many people wrote me, this site was a Yahoo site of the day, reviewed in a newspaper, and was even written up in an academic treatise or two. Since I first published this site back in the early 2000s, what I've done here has been done by many other people in many different ways - stop action daily photo journals, life-casting, and much more. Back when I created this site, I thought it would be fun to see if it would somehow be connected to personalizing and socializing the web - living online in some great world community. Since then Facebook and others figured that problem out in a much deeper sense, and the universal human community on the internet is still emerging. It does not involve handcoded html pages!. That's fine with me. This was just an idea, and is now an interesting historical artifact of an earlier day.
I have heard it said that the human body completely renews its cells (except perhaps the neurons) every seven years or so. By that standard, we are each a new person every seven years. I don't know if that is true or not. I do know this. When I arranged my life in seven year periods each of those periods seemed to represent a broadly coherent chapter. In contrast, a decade by decade arrangement produced no such coherence. Why does seven seem to be a good number to order the passage of time, whether the days of creation, the weeks or the years? Does the number seven really represent something deep about the structure of time? I don't believe that kind of thing, and yet...
