The art of writing Introductions has long demanded proper recognition. I too have long felt a pressing need to rescue this form of writing from the silence of forty centuries—from its bondage to the works to which its creations have been chained. When, if not in this age of ecumenicalism—that is to say, of all-powerful reason—is one finally to grant independence to this noble, unrecognized genre? I had in fact counted on somebody else fulfilling this obligation, which is not only aesthetically in line with the evolutionary course of art, but, morally, downright imperative. Unfortunately, I had miscalculated. I watch and wait in vain: somehow nobody has brought Introduction-writing out of the house of bondage, off the treadmill of villein service. So I have no choice: out of a sense of obligation rather than an impulse of the heart, I shall rush to the aid of Introduction-writing and become its liberator and obstetrician.

a viaticum from mighty lips

But this reckoning still fails to reveal what Art gains from its declared liberation. We already know that even too much heavenly manna leads to costiveness. How can we save ourselves from it?

We can supply the answer either in a flash, or with the help of higher hermeneutics.

Please observe how chatty the Bible is, how prolix the Pentateuch is, in describing the outcome of Genesis—and how laconic in giving the recipe for it!

for its tonal background will be created by jejune basses

or the borborygmus of persons passionate in their ineluctable collywobbles

I shall deceive you, and for that you will be grateful to me. I shall make you a solemn promise with no intention of keeping it, and that will satisfy you, or at any rate you will pretend that it does, with appropriate masterly skill; whereas, to fools who would want to excommunicate us both, you will say that in spirit they have fallen from the times and landed on a rubbish heap spat out by a precipitate Reality.

You will tell them there is nothing to be done: today art has become a promissory note without (transcendental) cover, a (counterfeit) pledge, an (unrealistic) forecast—the highest form of alteration. It is precisely this emptiness of art and its unrealizability which should be taken as its motto and bedrock. That is why I am right to present an Introduction to this short Anthology of Introductions, for I am proposing prefaces that lead nowhere, introductions that go nowhere, and forewords followed by no words at all.

So I shall show you Introductions as one shows a richly carved doorframe chased in gold and surmounted by counts and griffins on a majestic lintel.