_I wanted only to try to live in obedience to the promptings which
came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?_
In order to tell my story, I must begin far back. If it were possible,
I should have to go back much further still, to the earliest years of
my childhood, and even beyond, to my distant ancestry.
Authors, in writing novels, usually act as if they were God, and could,
by a broadness of perception, comprehend and present any human story as
if God were telling it to Himself without veiling anything, and with
all the essential details. That I cannot do, any more than can the
authors themselves. But I attach more importance to my story than can
any other writer to his: because it is my own, and it is the story of
a human being--not that of an invented, possible, ideal or otherwise,
non-existent creature, but that of a real, unique, living man. What
that is, a real living man, one certainly knows less to-day than ever.
For men are shot down in heaps--men, of whom each one is a precious,
unique experiment of nature. If we were nothing more than individuals,
we could actually be put out of the world entirely with a musket-ball,
and in that case there would be no more sense in relating stories. But
each man is not only himself, he is also the unique, quite special,
and in every case the important and remarkable point where the world’s
phenomena converge, in a certain manner, never again to be repeated.
For that reason the history of everyone is important, eternal, divine.
For that reason every man, so long as he lives at all and carries out
the will of nature, is wonderful and worthy of every attention. In
everyone has the spirit taken shape, in everyone creation suffers, in
everyone is a redeemer crucified.
Few to-day know what man is. Many feel it, and for that reason die the
easier, as I shall die the easier, when I have finished my story.
I must not call myself one who knows. I was a seeker and am still,
but I seek no more in the stars or in books; I am beginning to listen
to the promptings of those instincts which are coursing in my very
blood. My story is not pleasant, it is not sweet and harmonious like
the fictitious stories. It smacks of nonsense and perplexity, of
madness and dreams, like the lives of all men who do not wish to delude
themselves any longer.
The life of everyone is a way to himself, the search for a road,
the indication of a path. No man has ever yet attained to
self-realization; yet he strives thereafter, one ploddingly, another
with less effort, each as best he can. Each one carries the remains
of his birth, slime and eggshells of a primeval world, with him to
the end. Many a one will remain a frog, a lizard, an ant. Many a one
is top-part man and bottom-part fish. But everyone is a projection
of nature into manhood. To us all the same origin is common, our
mothers--we all come out of the womb. But each of us--an experiment,
one of nature’s litter, strives after his own ends. We can understand
one another; but each one is able to explain only himself.