Under My Skin

Under My Skin
Doris Lessing

The first volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, author of ‘The Grass is Singing’ and ‘The Golden Notebook’, and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.Winner of the James Tait Black Prize 1994.The first volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography begins with her childhood in Africa and ends on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel in her suitcase. it charts the evolution first of her consciousness, then of her sexuality and finally of her political awareness with an almost overwhelming immediacy, and is as distinctive and challenging as anything she has ever written. It is already recognised as one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century.

DORIS LESSING

Under My Skin

Volume One of

My Autobiography, to 1949

Table of Contents

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I’ve got you under my skin

I’ve got you deep in the heart of me

So deep in my heart you’re really a part of me,

I’ve got you under my skin.

I’ve tried so not to give in …

COLE PORTER

The individual, and groupings of people, have to learn that they cannot reform society in reality, nor deal with others as reasonable people, unless the individual has learned to locate and allow for the various patterns of coercive institutions, formal and also informal, which rule him. No matter what his reason says, he will always relapse into obedience to the coercive agency while its pattern is within him.

IDRIES SHAH, Caravan of Dreams

No matter where one looks on the face of the earth, wherever there are people, they can be observed syncing when music is played. There is popular misconception about music. Because there is a beat to music, the generally accepted belief is that the rhythm originates in the music, not that music is a highly specialized release of rhythms already in the individual. Otherwise how can one explain the close fit between ethnicity and music?

Rhythm patterns may turn out to be one of the most basic personality traits that differentiates one individual from another.

… when people converse … their brain waves even lock into a single unified sequence. When we talk to each other our central nervous systems mesh like two gears in a transmission.

The power of rhythmic message within the group is as strong as anything I know. It is … a hidden force, like gravity, that holds groups together.