Without Lifting A Finger

From the beginning (first chapter) of Klaus Mann's autobiography: Memories are made of peculiar stuff, elusive and yet compelling, powerful and fleet. You cannot trust your reminiscences, and yet there is no reality except the one we remember. Every moment we pass through derives its meaning from the preceding one. There would be no present nor future if the past were blotted out in the minds of men. It is our capacity for recollection which stands between us and chaos — a rather fragile bulwark, we must admit.

Have left the plays for now (I've read three thus far) to return to Strindberg's autobiographical work. The beginning of The Son of a Servant :      In the third story of a large house near Clara Church in Stockholm, the son of the shipping agent and the servant-maid awoke to self-consciousness. The child's first impressions were, as he remembered afterwards, fear and hunger. He feared the darkness and the blows, he feared to fall, to knock himself against something, or to go in the streets. He feared the fists of his brothers, the roughness of the servant-girl, the scolding of his grandmother, the rod of his mother, and his father's cane....

Finished Inferno and have moved on to The Confession of a Fool . Excerpt: What unparalleled guilelessness it argues to believe that there could be love without passion! There was danger even in the secret which existed between us. It was like a child conceived in secrecy, it grew and strove to see the light.