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, and 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. BTG XLVIII