I was more than ready to take the place. With the rest of the new administration I was sworn in, and so entered on my life work. It was a far cry from my earlier ambition to be a Fellow at Oxford. *BOOK IV* *I* "Literary unity" can be secured in an autobiography only at the expense of all sense of reality. The simplest of us is a multiple personality, can be described only partially from any one point of view. The text book on physiology which I studied in school contained three illustrations. One of them pictured a human being as a structure of bones, a skeleton; another showed man as a system of veins and arteries; the third as a mass of interwoven muscles. None of them looked like any man I have ever seen. It is the same with most autobiographies, the writers, in order to center attention on one phase of their activities, have cut away everything which would make their stories seem life-like. "The Memoirs" of Cassanova give us the picture of a lover. But he must have been something more than a _roué_. "The Personal Recollections" of General Grant portray the career of a soldier. But after all he was a man first, it was more or less by chance that he became a victory-machine. How fragmentary is the picture of his life, which Benvenuto Cellini gives us! I might accept these classic models and tell directly the story of my work in the Tombs. I might limit my narrative to that part of myself which was involved in friendship with Norman Benson. Or again, I might strip off everything else, ignore the flesh and bones and blood vessels, and write of myself as an "emotional system." In one of these ways I might more nearly approach a literary production. But certainly it would be at a sacrifice of verisimilitude. Perhaps some great writer will come who will unite the artistic form with an impression of actuality. But until genius has taught us the method we must choose between the two ideals. My choice is for reality rather than art. And life, as it has appeared to me, is episodal in form, unified only in the continual climaxes of the present moment. It is a string of incidents threaded on to the uninterrupted breathing of the same person. The facts of any life are related only _de post facto_, in that they influence the future course of the individual to whom they happen. The farther back we strive to trace these influences, which have formed us, the greater complexity we find. It is not only our bodies which have "family trees," that show the number of our ancestors, generation by generation, increasing with dizzy rapidity. It is the same with our thoughts and tastes. From an immensely diffuse luminosity the lens of life has focused the concentrated rays of light which are you and I.