One does not study man successfully from an ivory tower and part of my intentions has been to live a very full life in many strata so as to understand man. And this I have done.
I cannot say that I have liked all the things men do and say is necessary, but I can say that despite many reasons not to I have persevered in helping man all I could and continuing his friend.
Long since I ceased to talk about my real life. I learned long ago that man has his standards of credulity and when reality clashes with these he feels challenged.
For instance, I could read and write when I was three and a half. I could read minds and foretell the future with great accuracy. Such accomplishments startle people and I early learned in this lifetime to keep my own actual abilities to myself or else find sociability impossible.
I grew up on the frontier, amid brute force and the worship of brawn, learned to live in such a rough and tumble world, not die in forty below blizzards or lose my own standards in a barbarous society where agony was amusing to the people.
It carried its own legends and I had my adventures but I learned to tell the lesser tale.
No more than acclimatized in this lifetime to the old West, I found myself moved to the South Pacific and Asia, to a world of courtesy and soft ways and had to adopt a new pattern of survival.
This was no more than learned than I found myself, against my will, in the collegiate world studying engineering and mathematics, and learned new lessons in social contact. In this I was quite successful, becoming the head of various college clubs and societies. But in adapting a dead mathematics to new modern uses, I so assaulted the prejudices of my professors who thought dead mathematics should have no use that I learned once more about our world. I was ridiculed or frowned upon too often for writing or looking for the truth to ever conceive much love for the artificial towers of learning—so aloof from life. I decided to go study other races and organized an expedition and set sail in an old four-mast schooner rather than carry on longer in the academic world. I am amused to be condemned by some for not having studied in college a subject which was not taught there and which I had to develop to fill the gap in man’s knowledge of himself. The answers did not exist in the books of philosophy I studied. It had to be looked for in the real world.
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I wrote, I lived, I traveled, I prospered, I learned. I unfortunately could not quite help doing spectacular things. They would not look spectacular to me until I saw them in the eyes of others. And so I began to work very hard to tell the lesser tale, to do what I must to learn about man and help him as I could and yet not see wide-eyed disbelief, even shock, when someone at the Explorers Club would introduce me as having roped a Kodiak bear, having climbed a volcano to see its eruption at close hand or as the doer of some other feat. I became cautious in my anecdotes but I was looking at and living life, in order to experience it, and what happened to me was entirely secondary.
When you see a student body of would-be writers almost mob you for saying factually you wrote a hundred thousand words a month as a quota, when you tell what is to you a simple truth and yet find others consider it extraordinary beyond belief you grow cautious about retelling the consecutive incidents which are your day by day life. You conclude others don’t have a day by day life like that and so, not wanting to seem strange, you simply say less and when you do say you tell what you hope is ordinary and mildly entertaining.
Background for autobiography abounds. But who would read it as an honest tale and so I have not written it and never will. It would sound far, far too incredible. So I have abstained from writing vast tomes about myself and my adventures, not because I had done anything bad but because it was not important to do so and nobody would even believe my tales anyway.
