Less than 5,000 words in length, it is largely in third person, for reasons that Barfield explains early on:
The few pages of "Psychography" Barfield did complete certainly make the reader wish it had become a book. With the usual humor and brilliant insight, Barfield recollects moments from his childhood (battling "night-fears"; debating the development of consciousness out of matter with his siblings), school experiences (for example, the delightful irony of winning a theology prize at Highgate even though he was himself a non-believer) and military service (his dubious patriotism; the uneventfulness of his war experiences) and offers some telling speculations about such subjects as his early agnosticism and its later effect on his developing thought and the true nature of spiritual experience. |