Thinking back at my earliest memory, I do not come across the fable of Sitara first, but rather the fable "of the lost and forgotten human soul". I felt such endless pity for this soul. I have wept for it with my blind, unseeing eyes of a child. To me, this tale contained nothing but truth. But only years later, after I had experienced how life could treat a person and after I had extensively delved into the the heart of mankind, I realized that the knowledge of the human soul had indeed been lost and forgotten and that all of our psychology had not not yet been able to return this knowledge to us. In my childhood, I have spent hours sitting quietly and motionlessly, staring into the darkness of my sick eyes, to contemplate where this lost and forgotten soul might have ended up. I really, really wanted to find it. Then, grandmother took me on her lap, kissed me on the forehead and said: "Be quiet, my boy! Don't be sad for it! I have found it. It is here!" "Where?", I asked. "Here with me", she answered. "You are this soul, you!" "But I am not lost", I objected. "Of course, you are lost. You have been cast down into the poorest, dirtiest Ardistan. But you will be found; because even when everybody and all have forgotten about you, God has not forgotten about you." - I did not comprehend this, then; I only understood it later, much, much later. Actually, in this time of my early childhood, every living being was just a soul to me, nothing but a soul. I saw nothing. To me, there were neither appearances nor shapes, nor colours, neither locations nor movement from one location to another. I was very well able to feel, hear, and smell the persons and objects, but this was not enough to picture them truly and vividly. I could only imagine them. I did not know how a person, a dog, a table would look like; I could only picture it in my soul, and this picture reflected its soul. Whenever somebody spoke, I did not hear his body, but his soul. Not his external, but his internal appearance approached me. To me, there were only souls, nothing but souls. And so it has continued to be, even after I had learnt to see, from my boyhood on, up to this day. This is the difference between myself and others. This is the key to my books. This is the explanation for everything which has been praised or condemned in me. Only he who had been blind and became seeing again, and only he who possessed such a deeply rooted and powerful world within himself that it, even after he became seeing, dominated the world outside for his entire life, only he will be able to put himself in my place and understand everything what I was planning, what I did, and what I wrote, and only he will have the ability to criticise me, _nobody_ _else!_