To tell my story, I have to start very far back. In fact, if I could, I would have to go back much farther—to the very first years of my childhood, or even farther back, into the distant reaches of my origins.
When writers write novels, they tend to act as though they were God, who can see and understand anything and everything about a person’s story, and they present that story as though God himself were telling it, without all the veils of disguise that are the fundamental nature of life. I cannot do that—any more than these writers can. But my story is more important to me than some writer’s story is to him, because it is my own, and it is the story of a human being—not an imagined, possible, ideal, or in some other way nonexistent person but a real, unique, living, breathing one. Now we know much less today than ever before about what that is—a real living person—and as a result, people, each of them a precious, unique creation of nature, are being shot dead in enormous numbers. If each one of us were no more than a single human being, if the world really could completely be rid of us with a single bullet, then there would be no sense in telling stories anymore. But every person is more than himself: he is also the unique, entirely particular, and in every case meaningful and remarkable point of intersection where the phenomena of the world overlap, only once and never again in just this way. That is why everyone’s story is important, eternal, and godlike—why everyone, as long as and in whatever fashion he lives and fulfills the will of Nature, is wonderful and worthy of all our attention. Everyone is the spirit made flesh; in everyone, creation takes form and suffers; in everyone, a Redeemer dies on the cross.
Few know what a person is these days. But many feel it, and can die more easily, the way I will die more easily once I have written out this story to the end.
I cannot claim to possess any knowledge. I was a seeker, and I still am. But I no longer look to the stars, or seek in books; I have started to hear the lessons roared and murmured by the blood in my body. My story is not a happy one, not pleasing and harmonious like something invented—it reeks of meaninglessness and confusion, of insanity and dream, like the life of anyone who no longer wants to lie to himself.
Everyone’s life is a way into himself, or the attempt at a way, the hint of a path. No one is utterly and completely himself; everyone strives to become himself, however he can, this one dully, that one more brightly. We all carry traces of our birth with us to the end—the slime and eggshell of a primeval past. Some of us never become human, but stay a frog, a lizard, an ant. Some are human from the waist up and fish from the waist down. But everyone is a stab at humanity, a roll of Nature’s dice. We all share a common origin, our mothers; we all come out of the same gaping maw; but every one of us struggles—an attempt, a throw from the depths—to reach our own individual goal. We can understand each other, but each of us can truly grasp and interpret only himself.