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FREEDOMWAYS   FIRST QUARTER 1968

He also explains why he calls this autobiography, his third, A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century.  He does this with a characteristic honesty and integrity of purpose that guided his whole life and come through clearly on every page of this book.  Listen: 

"I mention this trip in some detail because it was one of the most important trips that I had ever taken, and had wide influence on my thought. To explain this influence my Soliloquy becomes an autobiography. Autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities. They are always incomplete, and often unreliable. Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life, with much forgotten and misconceived, with valuable testimony but often less than absolutely true, despite my intentions to be frank and fair.

"Who and what is this I, which is the last year looked on a torn world and tried to judge it? Prejudiced I certainly am by my twisted life; by the way I have been treated by my fellows; by what I myself have thought and done.  I have passed through changes by reason of my growth and willing; by my surroundings without; by knowledge and ignorance. What I think of myself, now and in the past, furnishes no certain document proving what I really am. Mostly, my life today is a mass of memories with vast omissions, matters which are forgotten accidentally or by deep design. 

"There are, of course, some fixed documents, like that memorandum on my 25th birthday, some letters to my mother, and that priceless letter to former President Hayes. In Dusk of Dawn, I wrote much about my life as I saw it at the age of 70, which differs much from what I think at the age of 91.  One must then see the varying views as contradictions to truth, and not as final and complete authority. This book then is the Soliloquy of an old man, what he dreams his life has been as he sees it slowly drifting away; and what he would like others to believe."

He then continues the story of his trip in the chapters that follow, providing us with his conceptual background history of the peoples of Western Europe in relation to the colonial peoples of the world now moving toward freedom, and devotes his final two chapters of the first part of the book to his eye-opening discovery of the Soviet Union and China.  

His background picture of the basis for his fully matured thinking on Socialism and Communism now complete, he stops his narrative

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