B1184 <=> B1186 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1185]

While I was reading that first chapter, which I wrote only six years ago, but which seems to me by my present sensing to have been written long long ago, a sensing which is now in my common presence obviously because during that time I had to think intensely and even as might be said, to “experience” all the suitable material required for eight thick volumes – not for nothing is it stated in that branch of genuine science entitled “the laws of association of human mentation,” which has come down from very ancient times and is known to only a few contemporary people, that the “sensing of the flow of time is directly proportional to the quality and quantity of the flow of thoughts” – well then, while I was reading just that first chapter, about which, as I said, I thought deeply from every aspect and which I experienced under the most exclusive action of my own willed self-mortification, in which, moreover, I wrote at a time when the functioning of my entire whole – a functioning which engenders in a man what is called “the-power-to-manifest-by-his-own-initiative” – was utterly disharmonized, that is to say, when I was still extremely ill owing to an accident that had not long before occurred to me, and which consisted of a “charge-and-crash” with my automobile at full speed into a tree standing silently, like an observer and reckoner of the passage of centuries at a disorderly tempo, on the historic road between the world capital of Paris and the town of Fontainebleau – a “charge” which according to any sane human understanding, should have put an end to my life – there arose in me from the reading of that chapter a quite definite decision.

Recalling my state during the period of the writing of that first chapter I cannot help adding here – owing to still another certain small weakness in me which consists of my always experiencing an inner satisfaction whenever I see appear on the faces of our estimable contemporary as they are called “representatives of exact science,” that very specific smile peculiar to them alone – that although my body after this accident was, as is said, “so battered and everything in it so mixed up” that for months it looked like a fragment of a general picture which might be described as “a bit of live meat in a clean bed,” nevertheless, and for all that, my correctly disciplined what is usually called “spirit,” even in that physical state of my body, was not in the least depressed, as it should have been according to their notions, but, on the contrary, its power was even intensified by the heightened excitation which had arisen in it just before the accident owing to my repeated disappointment in people, particularly in such people as are devoted, as they say to “science,” and also to my disappointment in those ideals which until then had been in me, and which had gradually been formed in my common presence, thanks chiefly to the commandment inculcated in me in my childhood, enjoining that “the highest aim and sense of human life is the striving to attain the welfare of one’s neighbor,” and that this is possible exclusively only by the conscious renunciation of one’s own.