Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by
anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record
that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It
was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some
sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months
before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was
destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both
these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born
towards the small hours on a Friday night.
Gloomy beginning. Twenty-four hours were at my mum's choice, twenty-four hours, each of them inevitably better than the following one, but no, doomed from the start, from the very beginning to a life full of mysteries. Had I been born to a different time, maybe I would have had a more promising future. I was not expected too much, nor was I condemned to get too much. Just born to attend the riveting mysteries of the common. The sketches of human sculpture. I was born to a world fed by human relations, of whatever kind, but human relations. Maybe it was not the time to leave the womb, too early, too fast, too cruel to be there. Born to a human world, our world? The one they had modeled for me. Welcome.
