Luckily, we have autobiographies where individuals volunteer their inner thoughts and feelings and narrate illuminating events in their lives.

Besides Jose Rizal whose life story is well known to all educated Filipinos, there are other Filipinos like Manuel Luis Quezon who took the time and effort to tell their personal legends.

In "The Good Fight," which was published in New York in 1946 by D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., the president of the Philippine Commonwealth taught his contemporaries as well as the next generation why public speeches by alien decision-makers must be monitored. "I feared that war was an early probability when, upon the departure of Ambassador Nomura, Foreign Minister Matsuoka made a speech before the Japan-American Policy Association…Matsuoka spoke no longer of merely the Greater East Asia policy; he spoke also of the co-prosperity sphere which…was plain enough to those who watched with open eyes Japan’s expansionist moves." (Underscoring supplied in the original) [p. 183]

Another person connected with the Philippines and with World War Two was Douglas MacArthur whose "Reminiscences" accentuated the strategic importance of the Philippines.

"The Japanese strategic objectives (later determined by captured war records) were complete hegemony in Asia and unchallenged supremacy in the western Pacific. This involved the immediate conquest and subjugation of the Philippines and the capture of the immense natural resources of the Netherlands East Indies and Malaya. The (Philippine) islands represented America’s single hope of effective resistance in Southeast Asia." [New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964, p. 111]

More than lessons on international affairs, these autobiographies offer tutorials on management and effectiveness. Here is MacArthur’s take on the wrong economy. "To build an army to be defeated by some other army is sheer folly, a complete waste of money. If you are defeated you will pay a billion dollars for every million you save on inadequate preparation." (Reply to a proposal in Congress to cut the officer corps) [p. 91]

Americans, among the peoples of the Earth, are preoccupied with success. Not just military men like MacArthur but sports stars like Kerri Strug are allergic to losses. Strug, a gold medalist at the 1996 Olympics, averred in her "Landing on My Feet" how "I liked the challenge and excitement of the competition. I never wanted to be defeated because death was a defeat." [Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Universal Company, 1997]

Why would a setback be deadly? Achievements in any field are difficult, involving sacrifices, training, discipline and inspiration. The craft of writing in particular is gut-wrenching. Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes the anguish involved in birthing a novel. "Each thing, just by looking at it, aroused in me an irresistible longing to write so I would not die. I had suffered this on other occasions, but only on that morning did I recognize it as a crisis of inspiration, that word, abominable but so real, that it demolishes everything in its path in order to reach its ashes in time." ["Living to Tell the Tale," Vintage, 2003]

The penchant for self-help among Americans has its origins in the founding of the United States. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, is well cited for his 13 Virtues, like "Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve."

Number 6: "Industry. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."

Number 12: "Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation." ["The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin," Dover Publications, 1996]

Success is, of course, a serious matter, but realism and wit should never be far from it. In his autobiography, Rodney Dangerfield (American actor whose real name is Jacob Cohen) echoes the pessimism of Ecclesiastes, but with a twist. "Life’s a short trip. You’ll find out. You were 17 yesterday. You’ll be 50 tomorrow. Life is tough, are you kiddin’? What do you think life is? Moonlight and canoes? That’s not life. That’s in the movies. Life is fear and tension and worry and disappointments. Life. I’ll tell ya what life is. Life is having a mother-in-law who sucks and a wife who don’t. That’s what life is." [p. 264]

Levity aside, the triumph of the spirit over temporal barriers has to be learned by the human in an age as early as he could afford. This essential message can be seen in one more autobiographical excerpt, as follows:

"I have often been asked when I wrote my first poem, when poetry was born in me. I’ll try to remember. Once, far back in my childhood, when I had barely learned to read, I felt an immense emotion and set down a few words, half rhymed but strange to me, different from everyday language. Overcome by a deep anxiety, something I had not experienced before, a kind of anguish and sadness, I wrote them neatly on a piece of paper. It was a poem to my mother…

"I had no way at all of judging my first composition, which I took to my parents. They were in the dining room, immersed in one of those hushed conversations…Still trembling after this first visit from the muse, I held out to them the paper with the lines of verse. My father took it absentmindedly, read it absentmindedly, and returned it to me absentmindedly, saying ‘Where did you copy this from?’ Then he went on talking to my mother in a lowered voice about his important and remote affairs.

"That, I seem to remember, was how my first poem was born, and that was how I had my first sample of irresponsible literary criticism." [Pablo Neruda. "Memoirs." NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 20]

Life is a teacher.