Читать книгу Five Weeks at Humanitas - Manfred Jurgensen - Страница 7

I am not the one who’s crazy!

Philip Roth, My Life as a Man

A Harvard professor kept badgering

Dylan Thomas about the meaning of symbols.

‘Mr Thomas, on line three you say …’

Thomas finally exploded:

‘Don’t you appreciate that to me

it’s not a symbol, it’s real?’

Dear Reader

The following autobiography is not written by a so-called celebrity, nor is it the record of a person remarkable in any other way. Its narrative is not so much about the individual as an attempt to recapture the events of a curious and comic, remarkable and extraordinary life. Both story and protagonist of this book, then, is life, being, existence. Strictly speaking, the text should not therefore be called an autobiography. Perhaps the term could be replaced with something like ‘auto-fiction’ or ‘bio-novel’. However, unfortunately we habitually perceive fiction as the opposite of reality. What is real cannot be fictional, least of all fictitious. My aim is not to fictionalise the author’s biography but to reveal the fiction of life itself.

Many distinguished writers have made pertinent statements about the nature of biographies, none more perceptive, I think, than Jose Ortega y Gasset when he says: ‘Biography is a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified’. Yet I would go one step further and claim that life creates its own ‘biographical’ fiction. At its most spectacular we’ve adopted the habit of calling it ‘coincidence’. The coexistence of events is not necessarily accidental. It may well be shaped by life forces the way artists are driven to formal compositions of their works. Whatever other meaning fiction may carry, it is always by its very nature the work of imagination. The French novelist Jules Renard writes in his Journals: ‘I have a passion for the truth and for the fictions that it authorises.’ How conceited of us to assume life does not possess the power of imagination! Fiction is not the preserve of humans just because they invented the term. I believe life itself is the most important and powerful author of all, with quirks and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, vice and scruples – and style, its own ‘personality’. Occasionally it even seems to have a sense of humour.

The following narrative attempts to bear witness to the magic, excitement and challenges of life. It is its story I wish to tell. The chronicle’s ‘I’ is the conduit of something much bigger than itself. In the grand scheme of things a tiny individual life seems of little significance.

Yet it is in personal experience that the power and magnificence of existence comes to bear. Despite the inauspicious start to his life, the disappointments and sufferings he shares with many others, the author means to offer his account as witness not for the prosecution but the defence. I have experienced life’s fiction as something more than improbable or unbelievable. For me, it was and remains the very magic of existence. My heart is filled with gratitude to all those who have shared in its magic and contributed to it.