The Promised Land | Page 2

fruits and drink of the
dew. Did they teach me from books, and tell me what to believe? I soon
chose my own books, and built me a world of my own.
In these discriminations I emerged, a new being, something that had
not been before. And when I discovered my own friends, and ran home
with them to convert my parents to a belief in their excellence, did I not
begin to make my father and mother, as truly as they had ever made me?
Did I not become the parent and they the children, in those relations of
teacher and learner? And so I can say that there has been more than one
birth of myself, and I can regard my earlier self as a separate being, and
make it a subject of study.
A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so
much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for
to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world is
so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work;
for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces.
Still there are circumstances by which a man is justified in pausing in
the middle of his life to contemplate the years already passed. One who
has completed early in life a distinct task may stop to give an account
of it. One who has encountered unusual adventures under vanishing
conditions may pause to describe them before passing into the stable
world. And perhaps he also might be given an early hearing, who,
without having ventured out of the familiar paths, without having
achieved any signal triumph, has lived his simple life so intensely, so
thoughtfully, as to have discovered in his own experience an
interpretation of the universal life.
I am not yet thirty, counting in years, and I am writing my life history.
Under which of the above categories do I find my justification? I have
not accomplished anything, I have not discovered anything, not even by
accident, as Columbus discovered America. My life has been unusual,
but by no means unique. And this is the very core of the matter. It is

because I understand my history, in its larger outlines, to be typical of
many, that I consider it worth recording. My life is a concrete
illustration of a multitude of statistical facts. Although I have written a
genuine personal memoir, I believe that its chief interest lies in the fact
that it is illustrative of scores of unwritten lives. I am only one of many
whose fate it has been to live a page of modern history. We are the
strands of the cable that binds the Old World to the New. As the ships
that brought us link the shores of Europe and America, so our lives
span the bitter sea of racial differences and misunderstandings. Before
we came, the New World knew not the Old; but since we have begun to
come, the Young World has taken the Old by the hand, and the two are
learning to march side by side, seeking a common destiny.
Perhaps I have taken needless trouble to furnish an excuse for my
autobiography. My age alone, my true age, would be reason enough for
my writing. I began life in the Middle Ages, as I shall prove, and here
am I still, your contemporary in the twentieth century, thrilling with
your latest thought.
Had I no better excuse for writing, I still might be driven to it by my
private needs. It is in one sense a matter of my personal salvation. I was
at a most impressionable age when I was transplanted to the new soil. I
was in that period when even normal children, undisturbed in their
customary environment, begin to explore their own hearts, and
endeavor to account for themselves and their world. And my zest for
self-exploration seems not to have been distracted by the necessity of
exploring a new outer universe. I embarked on a double voyage of
discovery, and an exciting life it was! I took note of everything. I could
no more keep my mind from the shifting, changing landscape than an
infant can keep his eyes from the shining candle moved across his field
of vision. Thus everything impressed itself on my memory, and with
double associations; for I was constantly referring my new world to the
old for comparison, and the old to the new for elucidation. I became a
student and philosopher by force of circumstances.
Had I been brought to America a few years earlier, I might have written
that in such and such a year my father emigrated, just as I would state

what he did for