rigues and adventures of a frisky order; but not the
more lascivious ones of later years. Then an illness caused me to think
seriously of burning the whole. But not liking to destroy my labor, I
laid it aside again for a couple of years. Then another illness gave
me long uninterrupted leisure; I read my manuscript, and filled in some
occurrences which I had forgotten, but which my diary enabled me to
place in their proper order. This will account for the difference in
style in places, which I now observe; and a very needless repetition,
of voluptuous descriptions, which I had forgotten, had been before
described; that however is inevitable, for human copulation, vary the
incidents leading up to it as you may, is, and must be, at all times,
much the same affair.

Then for the first time, I thought I would print my work that had been
commenced more than twenty years before, but hesitated. I then had
entered my maturity, and on to the most lascivious portion of my life,
the events were disjointed, and fragmentary and my amusement was to
describe them just after they occurred. Most frequently the next day I
wrote all down with much prolixity, since, I have much abbreviated it.

I had from youth an excellent memory, but about sexual matters a
wonderful one. Women were the pleasure of my life. I loved cunt, but
also she who had it; I like the woman I fucked and not simply the cunt
I fucked, and therein is a great difference. I recollect even now in a
degree which astonishes me, the face, color, stature, thighs, backside,
and cunt, of well nigh every woman I have had, who was not a mere
casual; and even of some who were. The clothes they wore, the houses and
rooms in which I had them, were before me mentally, as I wrote, the way
the bed, and furniture were placed, the side of the room the windows
were on, I remembered perfectly; and all the important events I can fix
as to time, sufficiently nearly by reference to my diary, in which the
contemporaneous circumstances of my life are recorded.

I recollect also largely what we said, and did, and generally our baudy
amusements. Where I fail to have done so, I have left description blank,
rather than attempt to make a story coherent by inserting what was
merely probable. I could not now account for my course of action, nor
why I did this, or said that, my conduct seems strange, foolish, absurd,
very frequently, that of some women, equally so, but I can but state
what did occur.