Fast Tristram Shandy Paradox

I really should do more reading, I just discovered this eponymous paradox. It is the opposite of the situation I find interesting.

Suppose Shandy starts writing his autobiography on his 30th birthday. He is a very fast and detailed writer and each day he puts to paper a whole year of his life, exactly moment by moment, missing nothing out. After a month he comes to the Betty Blue moment of sitting at a table writing about the build up to writing his autobiography. Then a new chapter starts of life after 30 and the final pages of the autobiography are the month he has sat writing his autobiography. Assuming he is able to compress the events, and write about them, rather than get stuck in the finite loop of copying his biography out, then a moment will come where he is writing about the actual present**. If he is writing with a pen he will be able to describe the movement of the pen nib on the page, the thoughts he is having, but he won't be able to ever end because even the final full stop on the last line that stops his autobiography will not be discussed in the autobiography. How can he discuss the end of the autobiography? How does he end it? The ending becomes something else very interesting to write about. Perhaps he can anticipate the end. For example,

"So as I write this perfect account of myself detailing all the things both big and small that have happened to me, there naturally comes a time when I must give up writing and return to living again. Hang up this pen, and walk out of this room where I have incarcerated my self for 31 days , and join the world that has travelling past my window this long while, apparently unperturbed by the secret attempt to defeat time that has been unfolding in this meagre room. Unfolding just as steadily as the words that have marched across these many pages now and which tired seek some sort of conclusion, some nucleus upon which to coalesce and cessate, an impenetrable wall that might arrest their flow. But where might one find this? I might be be interrupted by a knock on the door, or perhaps and emergency that demands my attention, or perhaps Death may steal into my room and take me away mid word, but this is not an end. Perhaps through pure will power I may stubbornly just stop, take charge of this situation and end the act of writing that, after all, I did initiate 31 days ago. But I was a different person then, that person is no more to be seen, that person I wrote about some pages ago, this person the one who must stop this autobiography is faced a challenge not met by the person who began this work. And I so I can keep writing forever looking for that conclusion, searching within the writing process for an end, but I have a paradox and the paradox is that to complete this ultra-detailed autobiography I must put to paper what is happening, and what is happening is me trying to end this autobiography, and so I can never put to paper the end of the biography. And were I to suddenly come upon the end (as indeed I am about to), I would only know after it has ended for sure whether this end has come. Perhaps in another day I may go back and make corrections, and these (to be accurate) would make new pages at the end of this stream of consciousness."

And so I can only end it by stepping outside the autobiography and look back at the quote marks and see that I did finally end. But the real paradox here is that the person who was writing is trapped inside those quotes. It takes me, outside the quotes, spreading down these words here, to look back and make a judgement from outside that the section above was ended. And if only I know that it was ended, if only I have that sort of perspective on the work, then one wonders whether the person writing really had a full view of themselves. And if they did not have a complete view of themselves then is the autobiography complete, is it really not just a biography from a perspective, albeit rather limited perspective. Were I to rewrite that passage above, I could say all sorts of things about the author that they were clearly unaware of as they wrote. And as the work already points out the person who started the autobiography was facing quite different issues to the one who was tasked with ending it.

So in conclusion there are many paradoxes to be had with trying to take ownership of what we write, and also with realism and the attempt to write the truth. If we cannot even write an autobiography that accurately records this moment in time, what chance do we have of writing the past. Suddenly what seemed to certain, is really more creative and abstract.

** If he translates time into writing at an even constant pace then he will arrive at the Fast Tristram Shandy Paradox after an infinite series with ith term = (30/365)^i. = 5475/182. SO it will arrive at the singularity point on the 31st day at 1.49am and 26.4 seconds exactly. At this instant he will be transcribing to paper the instant of transcription itself. It is also a fixed point of the transformation of writing because what is written is the same as writing itself.