A taste of Ustinov...

While rummaging in a used book store, I ran across Peter Ustinov's autobiography Dear Me, which starts out pretty strongly, but didn't entice me to take it home with me in the end.

The paragraphs that captured me:

Dear Me,

I have always thought—and stop me if I have wearied you with this reflection too often in the past—that most of the anomalies which afflict mankind are mere figments of nature blown up out of recognizable proportion. In other words, split personality, schizophrenia, is an exaggeration of a natural state at a point where the whole of a person's character is colored by its overweening contradictions. And yet, the personality of any normally constituted person must be capable of at least a certain flexibility, otherwise the machinery for doubt would be absent, and what is a more irrefutable proof of madness than an inability to have a doubt?

No, no, to ensure sanity, there must be at least the elements of an internal disagreement ever present in a personality, and it is for this reason, in the dearest hopes that you exist, that I address this attempt at an autobiography to you, dear me.

I flipped forward after this opening recital to see what else might be in the offing, but did not find anything else that grabbed my attention.

An interesting couple of paragraphs, to be sure, however.

Cheers...