Prologue

All I wanted was to try to live what was trying to come out of me of its own accord. Why was that so very hard?

To tell my story, I have to begin far back. If it were possible, I ought to go back much further still, to the very first years of my childhood and beyond them, into the distance of my origins.

When writers write novels, they tend to act as if they were God and could survey and comprehend some human story whole and entire and set it down as though God were telling it to himself, without any veils, essential at every point. I cannot do that, any more than the writers can. But my story matters more to me than any writer’s story matters to him; for it is my own, and it is the story of a human being—not an invented one, a possible one, an ideal one, or one that in some other way does not exist, but a real, unique, living human being. What that is, a real living human being, people admittedly know less today than ever before, and so they shoot human beings dead in masses, each one of whom is a precious, unique experiment of nature. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each of us could really be removed from the world entirely by a rifle bullet, there would be no point in telling stories anymore. But every human being is not only himself; he is also the unique, wholly particular point, important in every case and remarkable, where the phenomena of the world intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every human being’s story is important, eternal, divine; that is why every human being, as long as he lives at all and fulfills the will of nature, is wonderful and worthy of every attention. In each one the spirit has taken form, in each one the creature suffers, in each one a redeemer is crucified.

Few people today know what a human being is. Many feel it, and for that reason they die more easily, as I shall die more easily when I have finished writing this story.

I may not call myself one who knows. I was a seeker and am one still, but I no longer seek in the stars and in books; I am beginning to hear the teachings that my blood murmurs in me. My story is not pleasant, it is not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of nonsense and confusion, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

The life of every human being is a way to himself, the attempt at a way, the intimation of a path. No one has ever been wholly and entirely himself; yet everyone strives to become so, one dully, one more clearly, each as best he can. Everyone carries remnants of his birth, slime and eggshell from a primeval world, with him to the end. Some never become human, remain frog, remain lizard, remain ant. Some are human above and fish below. But each one is nature’s throw toward the human. We all have our origins in common, the mothers; we all come from the same abyss; but each one, an experiment and a throw from the depths, strives toward his own goal. We can understand one another; but each of us can interpret only himself.