An autobiography (自传）is only " a sort of life" --- it may contain less errors of fact thasn a biography（传记）, but it is necessary even more than selective: it begins later and it ends too early. If one cannot close a book of memories on the deathbed, any conclusion could be made and I have preferred to finish this essay with the yers of failure which followed the acceptance of my first novel. Failure too is a kind of death: the furniture sold, the drawers emptied, the removal truck waiting to take one to a less expensive destination （地点）. In another sense too a book like this can only be .a sort of life. , for in the course of sixty-six years I have spent almost as much time with characters in my imagination as with real men and women. Indeed, though I have been fortunate in the number of my friends, I can remember no stories of the famous -- the only stories which I more or less remember are the stories I have written. And the purpose for recording these events of the past? It is much the same purpose that has made me a novelist: a desire to reduce a great disorder of experience to some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity. We cannot love ourselves, and curiosity too begins at home. There is a fashion today among many people to treat the events of their past with irony 讽刺. It is a method of self-defence. .Look how stupid I was when I was young. keeps away cruel criticism, but it gives false account of history. We were not Eminent Georgians. Those emotions were real when we felt them. Why should we be more ashamed of them than of the indifference of old age? I have tried. however unsuccessfully, to live again the foolish things I did and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony.

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