20050611.00

     My assertion that autobiography is incompatible with truth
comes back to haunt me. All serious writing is if not
deliberately, yet inadvertently autobiographical, insofar as it
is meaningful only to the extent that it expresses, and thus
reveals, the author's conviction.  To argue what a man thinks
need not necessarily express who he is, trivializes both thought
and character.  It might be more accurate to say that it is
reflection or self-consciousness which makes autobiography
untruthful; and that accordingly, truth inheres in the naive,
unselfconscious autobiographical stories told by the child, even
when these stories are whimsical or fantastic; indeed that the
truth told by the child is the only truth we have.

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