Prefacing always seems a peculiar, fraught experience. Recall A. W. Price’s Mental Conflicts and how he frames his work with the aid of E. M. Cioran:
A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable
Contra Price, this staking of self and soul must be performed, not declared; it must be earned and woven into the very logic of the piece.
