From the beginning of Chapter I.
PURELY for my own sake I have often wished to make a review of what the Curé dArs calls ma pauvre vie; for it seems to me that our experience is given us to be the food of our character and spiritual life; but, in point of fact, we spend our whole life in storing up food, and never have leisure to lie down quietly, with the cows in the field, and ruminate, bit by bit, what we have swallowed so hastily. To recall everything were impossible and perhaps profitless; but at least one should endeavour to grasp this same pauvre vie in its general unity, filling in such parts of the outline, as may seem worth it, in greater detail. The great difficulty attendant on such a task is self-deception and a desire of ?posing,? even before ones own consciousness. Just as a child instinctively plays the part of a soldier or a robber or some other that interests his imagination, so through life we are all subconsciously playing out some rôle or other, we have some theory, some view about ourselves?not always the same necessarily?in the light of which we mentally construct our autobiography. One even hears people * occasionally avow some fault or tendency, in a way that implies they have made it their deliberate rôle, ?I am dreadfully proud,? says one ; or ?I always say what I think and mean what I say?; or ?You know I never can forgive?these and a thousand like professions really mean that such is the part the speaker has chosen to play in the drama of life; that it is what he or she likes to believe about him or herself. Indeed on this point the difficulty of the autobiographer is just that of the biographer, who necessarily approaches his matter with a certain view or conception, which acts as a principle of selection.
To say that I am at present free from any such subconscious conception of myself would be to say I were more than mortal, but as far as my explicit consciousness goes nobody could approach himself more impartially, or with greater detachment, or even dislike, than I do ; and I may say that I await the completion of the task, should I have patience to complete it, with a sort of absolute curiosity as to what the tout ensemble shall be like. It is nothing that my life is void of almost a single incident of moment; for it is not the big, but the little things, that are instructive?not the exotics of the hothouse, but the weeds and nettles of the wayside.