It leads the biographer into uncharted wildernesses, into vertiginous abysses, across endless plains. The only way to increase verisimilitude is to invent characters who swirl around your subject and have all sorts of revealing experiences, enjoying imagined glimpses and conducting imagined conversations. Sunt lacrimae rerum. Only Beethoven in the closing movement of the Ninth Symphony has come even close to sensing the vastness of the task. Music alone, especially that of the German Romantics, can convey the depths the biographer must traverse.
Most biographers are too stupid to come close to glimpsing that awesome truth.
Mit der Dummheit k mpfen die G tter selbst vergebens. To see others as they see themselves Is like trying to measure elves. It is impossible not to err. I had first met Voltaire in 1753 at what Peter Gay would call a party. Nobody knew me at the time, of course, and he was a celebrity surrounded by admiring women, and this gave me an excellent opportunity to remain in the background and study him.