Reader, I may be far from the man you think I am. But who, in any case, do you think I am? I am a man, as you know; but ask yourself, reader, what you consider a man to be.

You can dream easily enough of the body of a man sitting at this table where all these pages have been strewn. The body is not yet old, but certainly it is no longer young, and the belly on the body protrudes a little, and the hair on the head of the body is turning grey at the edges. You can dream of yourself seeing that body, and I was going to write that you can dream of the words that the hand of the body writes on the pages in front of the belly of that body, but of course you do not have to dream, since you are reading this page at this moment.

Do you suppose then, reader, having dreamed and read, that you have learned what I am?

Let me tell you, reader, what I consider you to be.

Your body – whether or not the belly of it protrudes or the hair on the head of it is turning grey, and whether the hand in front of the belly is writing or at rest or busy at something else – your body is the least part of you. Your body is a sign of you, perhaps: a sign marking the place where the true part of you begins.

The true part of you is far too far-reaching and much too many-layered for you or me, reader, to read about or to write about. A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have been from your birthplace to the place where you sit now reading this page. And, reader, even if you tell me you have lived all your life in a place of books and colour-plates and hand-written texts deep in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute – as well you may have lived it – even then, reader, you know and I know that every morning when you first turned your eyes on that place it was a different place. And when every place where you have ever been on every day of your life has been marked on the map of the true part of you, why then, reader, the map has been barely marked. There are still to mark all those places you have dreamed about and all those places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about. Then, reader, you know as well as I know that when you have not been dreaming you have been looking at pages of books or standing in front of bookshelves and dreaming of yourself looking at pages of books. Whatever places you saw at such times, along with all the places you dreamed of yourself seeing, must all appear on the map of the true part of you. And by now, you suppose, the map must be almost filled with places.

Do not merely suppose, reader. Look with your eyes at what is in front of you. All the places you have so far marked have only sprinkled the wide spaces of the map with a few dots of towns and hairlines of streams. The map shows many hundreds of places for every hour of your life; but look, reader, at all the bare spaces on the map, and see how few the marked places still seem. You have looked at places and dreamed of places and dreamed of yourself looking at places or remembering places or dreaming of places during every hour of your life, reader, but still your map is mostly empty spaces. And my map, reader, is hardly different from yours.

All those empty spaces, reader, are our grasslands. In all those grassy places see and dream and remember and dream of themselves having seen and dreamed and remembered all the men you have dreamed you might have been and all the men you dream you may yet become. And if you are like me, reader, those are very many men, and each of those men has seen many places and dreamed of many places and has turned many pages and stood in front of many bookshelves; and all the places or the dream-places in the lives of all those men are marked on the same map that you and I are keeping in mind, reader. And yet that map is still mostly grasslands or, as they are called in America, prairies. The towns and the streams and the mountain ranges are still few, reader, compared with the prairie-grasslands where you and I dream of coming into our own. (Inland)