The author leads us to reflect not just on the ways in which the lives of these characters have unfolded over time, but also on the unfolding of time itself.
This memoir has a lot to say not only about the author’s life, but about life itself.The word "itself” adds virtually nothing meaningful to such sentences. One could I suppose argue that it adds emphasis, but the fundamental work it is asked to do is not to lend emphasis but rather to lend a sense of portentousness to what one is saying. Compare these two:
I’m not talking about just a few of us. I’m talking about humanity.
I’m not talking about just a few of us. I’m talking about humanity itself.The first sounds a bit melodramatic, and a bit self-important. The second sounds somehow more intellectual—and more like a thought that might start to verge on the profound.
Any association with genuine profundity is of course entirely spurious. The word “itself” adds nothing meaningful in itself.
It’s interesting to look at the history of the word itself being used in this way. We often tend these days to think of the Victorian era as the height of portentousness. But according to Google Ngram, this sort of portentous use of itself declined steadily through the Victorian era (after peaking in the late eighteenth century and then plateauing through to about 1840). It remained low through most of the twentieth century, before starting to rise in the 1990s, reaching another peak around 2020.
Are we in the height of a new age of portentousness? The history of this use of itself constitutes only one small piece of evidence; it’s surely not conclusive. But it is suggestive.
