ABSTRACT
To assume the role of a writer is always a daring act. To place one’s own scant talent before a tradition more than three thousand years old is, to put it mildly, an excess of vanity. But here I am, responsible for an incipient work which is, at times, an excessively harsh accusatory finger. At eighteen years of age—it was at that age that I seriously began to practice this pretended occupation—one attempts to take the literary heavens by force. We already know that ignorance is bold; in the case of the writer, ignorance also has pride to give unsound advice. At that age I had read little; and I had rather be measured in terms of my neighbors than by my heroic grandparents who, because they had lived so long, appeared unreachable. Dante, Tolstoy, and Cervantes often seemed boring; anyone claiming the opposite is probably fibbing. I preferred the story about the young madman of Prague who was transformed into an insect to Tolstoy’s three hermits (a tale which, for all its wisdom, is somewhat sentimental). If one does not know life, one ignores the greatness of those hands which have touched it so tenderly and yet so terribly.
