In brief, I am a human being.
I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting
dead-feeling genius.
And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.
So assayed I begin to write this book of myself, to show to myself in
detail the woman who is inside me. It may or it mayn’t show also a
type, a universal Eve-old woman. If it is so it is not my purport. I
sing only the Ego and the individual.
So does in secret each man and woman and child who breathes, but is
afraid to sing it aloud. And mostly none knows it is that he does
sing. But it is the only strength of each. A bishop serving truly
and tirelessly the poor of his diocese serves a strong vanity and
ideal of the Ego in himself. A starving sculptor who lives in and for
his own dreams is an Egotist equally with the bishop. And both are
Egotists equally with me.
Egotist, not egoist, is my word: it and not the idealized one is the
‘winged word.’
It is made of glow and gleam and splendor, that Ego. I would be its
votary.
So I write me this book of Me--my Soul, my Heart, my sentient Body,
my magic Mind: their potentialities and contradictions.
--there is a Self in each human one which lives and has its sweet
vain someway-frightful being not in depths and not in surfaces but
Just Beneath The Skin. It is the Self one keeps for oneself alone.
It is the Essence of soul and bones. It is the slyest subtlest thing
in human scope. It is the loneliest: tragically lonely. It is long,
long isolation--beautiful, terrifying, barbarous, shameful, trivial
to points of madness, ever-present, infinitely intriguing to oneself,
passionately hidden: hidden forever and forever--
It is my aim to write out that in the pages of this Me-book: no
depths save as they come up and touch that, no surfaces save as they
sink skin-deep. Only the flat unglowing bloody Self Just Beneath My
Skin.
I shall fail in it, partly because my writing skill is unequal to
some nicenesses in the task, but mostly because I am not very honest
even with myself.
I’ll come someway near it.
_Half inevitably, half by choice_