The novel [he says] tells of many things that until now have not been touched upon. They are so peculiar to ourselves that we have been sensitive about them. In this book I have attempted what no one else seems to have been willing to do. For one thing, I have dared to answer the calumnies that for centuries have been heaped upon us and upon our country. I have written of the social condition of the Philippines and of the life of the Filipinos. I have told the truth about our beliefs, our hopes, our longings, our complaints, and our sorrows. I have tried to show the difference between real religion and the hypocrisy that under its cloak has impoverished and brutalized us. I have brought out the real meaning of the dazzling and deceptive words of our countrymen. I have related our mistakes, our vices, and our faults. I have exposed how weakly we accept miseries as inevitable. Where there has been reason for it, I have given praise. I have not wept over our misfortunes, but rather laughed at them. No one would want to read a book full of tears, and then, too, laughter is the best means of concealing sorrow. The incidents that I have related are all true and have actually occurred. But for his habitual reticence about himself he might have said much more; if he had known his own powers he might have spoken of his lifelike delineations; he might have urged a gift like prophecy. All the impression of a strong personal relation one has throughout the reading of “Noli Me Tangere” is well founded. Into it Rizal was writing himself. Ibarra was a prefiguration, in some respects marvelously accurate, of himself in the days at hand when he should return to his native country. Of the material of the book the greater part had been verified in his own experiences. The imprisonment of Ibarra’s father was the story of Rizal’s own mother. Father Damaso he had seen and watched, and Father Silva no less. In Tasio, the philosophical evolutionist, he had but drawn his own elder brother, Paciano. But above all, the story of Maria Clara was a tragedy from his own life; at that time a tragedy he might have feared but had not as yet experienced, strange as that may seem.