Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

PREFACE

IT HAS several times been suggested to me, always to my great annoyance, that I should write an autobiography. Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to escape it than most people make to get it. Moreover, biographical writing, especially of the popular type, presupposes a subject who has achieved, or at least tried to achieve, something ponderable, substantial; and I have done neither. I have led a singularly uneventful life, largely solitary, have had little to do with the great of the earth, and no part whatever in their affairs or for that matter, in any other affairs. Hence my autobiography would be like the famous chapter on owls in Bishop Pontoppidan’s history of Iceland. The good bishop wrote simply that there are no owls in Iceland, and that one sentence was the whole of his chapter.

One evening, however, an old friend, Mr. William Harlowe Briggs, brought up the matter again, saying he had a new idea. He proposed that I should write a purely literary and philosophical autobiography with only enough collateral odds and ends thrown in to hold the narrative together. As he put it to me, the idea seemed to have something in it. His notion was the perfectly sound one that every person of any intellectual quality develops some sort of philosophy of existence; he acquires certain settled views of life and of human society; and if he would trace out the origin and course of the ideas contributory to that philosophy, he might find it an interesting venture. It is certainly true that whatever a man may do or say, the most significant thing about him is what he thinks; and significant also is how he came to think it, why he continued to think it, or, if he did not continue, what the influences were which caused him to change his mind. In short, what Mr. Briggs proposed was a history of ideas, the autobiography of a mind in relation to the society in which it found itself.

After thinking over this suggestion for a day or two, I decided to do what I could with it. I do not think the result, as here presented, would interest many people or benefit anybody; I did not expect or intend it to do either. I contemplated nothing but a tour de force, a literary venture in a field which, if not quite new, was at any rate new to me, and is one which modern autobiographical writing tends to avoid. I now see that I have succeeded with it much better than I supposed I should, and therefore I have turned my manuscript over to Mr. Briggs to do with as he likes. I have no further interest in it, except as I indulge the hope that he will think his idea has been satisfactorily worked out.

ALBERT JAY NOCK