The First Year of My Life

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The First Year of My Life --Muriel Spark I was born on the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday. Testimony abounds that during the first year of my life I never smiled. I was known as the baby whom nothing and no one could make smile. Everyone who knew me then has told me so. They tried very hard, singing and bouncing me up and down, jumping around, pulling faces. Many times I was told this later by my family and their friends, but, anyway, I knew it at the time. You will shortly be hearing of that new school of psychology—or maybe you have heard of it already—which, after long and far-adventuring research and experiment, has established that all of the young of the human species are born omniscient. Babies, in their waking hours, know everything that is going on everywhere in the world; they can tune in to any conversation they choose, switch on to any scene. We have all experienced this power. It is only after the first year that it is brainwashed out of us, for it is demanded of us by our immediate environment that we grow to be of use to it in a practical way. It is not a new theory. Poets and philosophers, as usual, have been there first. But scientific proof is now ready and to hand. Any day now, it will be given to the world, and the world will be convinced. Let me, therefore, get my word in first, because I feel pretty sure, now, about the authenticity of my remembrance of things past. My autobiography, as I very well perceived at the time, started in the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far. Apart from being born bedridden and toothless, unable to raise myself on the pillow or utter anything but farmyard squawks or police-siren wails, I was further depressed by the curious behavior of the two-legged animals around me. There were those black-dressed people, females of the species to which I
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