The Memoirist

Kitāb al-insān (Book of Man)

Editor’s Note: The Kitāb al-insān (Book of Man) is a treatise purportedly written by Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, the great Khwarazmian Iranian polymath (c. 973 – 1050 AD). The work, if genuine, is perhaps one of the earliest works of ethnography in history. The author documents the stories of various individuals, communities, and cultures that reached him in Bukhara, as well as those he visited in person – particularly during his time in India. It is thought the work entered Latin-Christendom via the Jewish translators of Toledo sometime in the 12th century.

There once lived a man, here, in this very city, who on approaching the end of his days felt it necessary, for posterity’s sake, to put into writing the story of his life. He sat down at his desk with parchment, a quill, and a bottle of ink, and wondered how he should begin. 

In the spirit of fullness, completeness, he felt it extremely necessary to start at the very beginning. He decided that, though he had no memory of them, he could not ignore those earliest years of his childhood, and so the memoir would need to start with the exact moment of his birth. So concluding, the man dipped his quill-tip, made from a particularly fine eagle feather, into the ink and moved so as to scratch the first letter on the page, but paused just before making contact with the parchment. A thought had occurred to him: was his birth truly his beginning? Had he not lived for almost ten long months within his mother’s womb before that fateful day when he first entered the world? On second thought, how preposterous it was to think he could write a total description of his life without mentioning those formative weeks! I must instead begin at the moment of conception, he thought to himself, for only then will I fully encapsulate everything about myself and the life I have lived. 

For a second time the man moved his hand to etch onto that parchment the first letter of his first word, only to withdraw it once again. Certainly it was true that the twin parts of himself that would go one to become a single coherent whole only came together at the moment of conception, but did not those separate strands of selfhood exist in his parents before that? And to really comprehend the man he would go on to become, would the reader not need to understand from whence he came first? A true autobiography would require the understanding of the lives of his parents, so as to fully comprehend the type of man that they would go on to form and raise. 

This time the man did not even get so far as dipping his pen before he halted. On reflection, thought the man, in order to fully understand my parents, would I not need to tell the story of my parents’ parents, my grandparents? And of course, if that were the case, and he could not help but conclude it was, then would he then not need to first tell the story of his grandparents’ parents, and subsequently their parents’ parents, and so on and so forth until the man so pondering at his desk traced back his lineage to the First Man and First Woman. 

He still sat in his chair contemplating how to begin with as yet no pen having touched paper, when he realised that, actually, in order to fully understand the lineage of man, and so understand himself, he must first trace back through the history of the various apes and beasts from which man had sprung. 

For many moons, the man sat at his desk, plotting a route back through the mammals, reptilians, amphibians, fish, jellies, echinoderms, and amoebas that were his ancestors until he had arrived back to the first prokaryote, without ever having written a single word. 

But, thought the man, to fully comprehend that first living being, which lived all those years ago, would he not need to first describe the nature of protein folding, and thus in turn, amino acid formation, which of course meant elucidating the primordial conditions of the Earth, its weather and geology and – oh! – the nature of plate tectonics, rock formation, the molecular make-up of the various organic and inorganic compounds, and thus the atoms from which they are made, which were of course forged themselves in stars many aeons ago? And of course, stars themselves are made from hot, dense clouds of hydrogen and helium, so he must first explain that these elements are made up from the subatomic particles of protons, neutrons, and electrons, which in turn are made from quarks of various colours, spins, and agitations, and even these from a deeper, more fundamental vibration of fields and energy. Yes, the man thought, he would need to describe them all. 

For did not all the constituent elements of himself already exist at the moment of creation? Did not he exist all through the history of time, not in the eventual form which his body constitutes, sitting now, at his desk, but in the potentiality of his being? For did not the quarks that form the electrons, neutrons, and protons, that form the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms, that form his cells, that form his tissues, that form his organs, that form his body, not all exist in that very same instant that the cosmos first began? Yes, thought the man, my beginning was the first beginning.

And so it was that after one hundred days and one hundreds nights of ceaseless contemplation that the man dipped his quill into the inkwell and began to scratch the very first words of his memoir:

In the beginning...