People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make

"People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up." – Tom Robbins

O children of the earth, gather closely, for the words of Tom Robbins hold a reflection of a deep and ancient truth, one that speaks to the very nature of imagination and its power to create worlds beyond the known. In his statement, Robbins reveals a profound insight into the human condition. To write a memoir is to recount the events of one’s own life, to write what is true and familiar. But Robbins dares to suggest that the reason people turn to such acts of recollection is because they lack the imagination to craft a world beyond their own experience, a world born of pure creation. Memoirs, then, are not the work of boundless creativity but of limitation—they arise from the need to capture the known, to hold on to what has passed, because the mind is unable or unwilling to step beyond that boundary and build something new.

In the ancient world, great epic poets like Homer and Virgil were not content with mere retelling of history. They did not write memoirs, for they understood that the true power of imagination lies in the creation of stories that transcend reality. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were not simple accounts of Greek history; they were the fruits of an immense imagination, where the gods themselves mingled with men, where heroes fought not only with weapons but with fate itself. The imagination of Homer was boundless, allowing him to create worlds where the lines between the real and the fantastical were forever blurred. To him, the world of pure fiction was a place of grandeur, of heroic acts and divine intervention, and that was where the true power of storytelling lay.

But Robbins points to something important. The memoir, as an art form, is not about the expansion of the soul through creative vision—it is about the preservation of the self through memory. Memoirs are not constructed from the fabric of the unknown, the unexplored, or the imaginative. Instead, they are built from the known—events, people, places that already exist in the writer’s life. Memoirists cling to these familiar realms, often because they fear stepping into the unknown world of fiction, where they must invent, create, and imagine things beyond their own lived experience. Robbins reminds us that the true artist, the true creator, does not limit themselves to what has happened, but dares to imagine what could be. They craft entire worlds, weaving stories from the ether, drawing from a place of limitless creation.

Consider, O children, the life of Mark Twain, whose Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not a recounting of his own life, but a masterpiece born of boundless imagination. Twain, like Robbins, recognized that imagination was the force that could carry him beyond the limitations of his own experience. He took the raw materials of life—his experiences growing up along the Mississippi River—and built upon them, transforming them into a world of adventure and moral reckoning. Twain did not write a memoir; he wrote a fiction that became, in many ways, a more enduring truth than any memoir could offer. Through the eyes of Huckleberry Finn, he created a story not bound by the specifics of his own life, but by the universal truths of human nature and the journey toward self-discovery.

And yet, there is a wisdom to be found in the writing of memoirs, for they serve to preserve the truth of one’s life. But Robbins reminds us that these truths are often limited, constrained by the scope of what is known and what has already passed. The imagination, however, is boundless. It is through imagination that we can transcend our own limitations, and see the world not as it is, but as it could be. Memoirs offer us the stories of the past, but fiction—the product of imagination—offers us the possibility of a future that has yet to be written, a world that has yet to come into being.

Now, O children, I ask you: where will your imagination take you? Will you, like the memoirists, hold tightly to the world as it is, repeating the stories of your own life, or will you let your imagination take you to places unknown, to realms that exist only in your heart and mind? The true artist is the one who creates, who builds not from memory, but from the heart’s deepest desires, who dares to imagine a world beyond the one they have known. This is the gift of the imagination—to shape not only our stories but our very world, to transcend the limitations of the past and to create the future.

The lesson, O children, is clear: do not let your life be defined only by what you have lived. Let it be shaped by what you can imagine. If you wish to be truly free, to be truly significant, you must go beyond the boundaries of the known and enter the vast, uncharted realm of imagination. For it is there, in the boundless expanse of creativity, that the true power of storytelling lies. Create, explore, and imagine, for it is through the imagination that you will shape the world, not as it is, but as it could be.