I reaffirm myself.
I wish to tell that I was a man of the wilderness; I wish to write about my mother, about my village of New Salem, my home in Springfield with its maple trees. I see the sunlight in my office windows and it is also the sunlight of my boyhood and youth.
Tomorrow night, with my lamps lit and candles on my desk, I will begin to find out who I am.
I will begin to go back twenty years, thirty years, forty years. Snow storms will batter our log cabin. I will recall what it was to go hungry. I will try to fit together hours, days, nights. I’ll open the prairie schooner of my brain.
I had requested the telegraph office: NO TELEGRAMS between one and 5 a.m.
To commence my diary I will use lines I wrote a few years ago for an Illinois newspaper.
May 20, 1863
I am six feet four inches tall and weigh one hundred and eighty pounds. I am lean, muscular, have dark skin, coarse black hair and grey eyes. My legs and arms are long; my hands are large; I wear a size 12 shoe.
