Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Schickel

Schickel’s line flatters memory by dragging it out of the mist and into a newsroom. “Personal journalism” is the key provocation: memory isn’t a vault, it’s a beat. It observes, selects, frames, and files. That metaphor does two things at once. It dignifies the act of remembering as labor (the soul as reporter, editor, and archivist), and it quietly indicts memory as something less than truth. Journalism implies deadlines, angles, omissions, even the occasional correction buried on page A17. Your past, Schickel suggests, is not recovered; it’s written.

The subtext is a critique of the modern fantasy that sincerity equals accuracy. “Personal” makes the bias explicit. We don’t just recall events; we craft a story in which we can keep living. The soul’s “journalism” turns chaos into narrative, guilt into motive, heartbreak into plot. That’s why memory can feel both intimate and strangely performative: it’s always addressed to an audience, even if the audience is your future self.

Context matters because Schickel made his name as a critic and cultural writer, someone professionally attuned to how stories get packaged and how myths form around celebrities, movies, and eras. He understood that public journalism doesn’t merely report culture; it helps manufacture it. By borrowing that apparatus for inner life, he implies that identity is a media product too: edited, captioned, periodically revised. The line lands because it’s comforting and unnerving in the same breath. It offers the soul a vocation, then reminds you the vocation comes with spin.