Thesis Statement: But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

I. Such fancies are not foreign to young lives. A. Nature expects a grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft. B. In order to enjoy life, we should not imagine too much.

II. I rebel against this state of affairs. A. Efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness of both sides of my life. B. Discovered that the prison of time is spherical and without exits.

III. Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison. A. Bright blocks of memory are formed, affording memory a slippery hold. B. The beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time.

IV. Thus, when the newly disclosed, fresh and trim formula of my own age, four, was confronted with the parental formulas, thirty-three and twenty-seven, something happened to me. A. Felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. B. Became accurately aware that the twenty-seven-year-old being, in soft white and pink, holding my left hand, was my mother, and that the thirty-three-year-old was my father. C. His left-hand-holder and right-hand-holder had both been present before in my vague infant world.

V. My father, let it be noted, had served his term of military training long before I was born, so I suppose he had that day put on the trappings of his old regiment as a festive joke. A. Since the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile. B. On the wall against which the divan stands, another phase of history is marked by a gray engraving in an ebony frame.

VI. With the help of some grown-up person, who would use first both hands and then a powerful leg, the divan would be moved several inches away from the wall, so as to form a narrow passage which I would be further helped to roof snugly with wit the divan’s bolsters and close up at the ends with a couple of its cushions. A. Reach the tunnel’s far end, and then, in a mesh of sunshine on the parquet under the cane work of a Viennese chair and two gamesome flies settling by turns. B. Ruddy glitter of the snugly enveloped facets that came seeping through with a miraculous completeness of glow and color. C. Was not yet the closest he got to feeding upon beauty.

VII. How small the cosmos, how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words! A. Diamonds that he later gave away to his characters to alleviate the burden of his wealth. B. Nothing is sweeter or stranger than to ponder those first thrills. C. Genius disappeared when everything had been stored, just as it does with those other, more specialized child prodigies. D. The individual mystery remains to tantalize the memoirist. E. Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.

VIII. To fix correctly, in terms of time, some of my childhood recollections, I have to go by comets and eclipses, as historians do when they tackle the fragments of a saga. A. There is no dearth of data. IX. The place is of course Abbazia, on the Adriatic. A. A bracelet that he treasures "until it developed dark streaks inside which i decided as in a dream" B. Basically stole food and kept it quiet uncomfortably C. Russia was fighting Japan

X. I had an even earlier association with that war. A. Was shown by a family friend the example of calm and stormy sea B. Family friend gained supreme command of the Russian Army in the Far East

XI. This incident had a special sequel fifteen years later, when at a certain point of my father's flight from Bolshevik-held St. Petersburg to southern Russia he was accosted while crossing a bridge, by an old man who looked like a gray-bearded peasant in his sheepskin coat. A. Hope that old Kuropatkin, in his rustic disguise, manage to evade Soviet imprisonment. B. Believed that the following of such thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.

XII. The close of Russia's disastrous campaign in the Far East was accompanied by furious internal disorders. A. His mother, with her three children, returned to St. Petersburg after almost a year of foreign resorts. B. His father was in the capital; one of the founding fathers of the Constitutionalists Democratic Party. C. His brother and him could read and write English but not Russian. D. Would get tutored by the village schoolmaster every afternoon.
XIII. With a sharp and merry blast from the whistle that was part of my first sailor suit, my childhood calls me back into that distant past to have me shake hands again with my delightful teacher. A. First day he brought in alphabetical blocks B. He revered his father because he recently rebuilt and modernized the village and school. C. Angrily refused to be treated as a child of six to tedious quotations.
XIV. To him, in a way, I owe the ability to continue for another stretch along my private footpath which runs parallel to the road of that troubled decade. A. July 1906, the Tsar unconstitutionally dissolved the Parliament, with his father being a member. B. His mother preserved the letters that he managed to smuggle through to her that were written in toilet paper C. When his father returned home, the village people basically treated him like king

XV. The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century. A. If the group of villagers wanted to see the barin then the butler would inform his father and he would do as they say. B. Saying the village people were never satisfied. C. The good barin would be put through the national ordeal of being rocked and tossed up and securely caught by a score or so of strong arms.

XVI. In the dining room, my brother and I would be told to go on with our food. A. Repeatedly saying how his father was floating and levitating. B. “The priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.” C. Implying that his father had passed away and is floating to his coffin to his “eternal repose”