The Museum of Eterna's Novel

ANOTHER PROLOGUE

This is entirely another prologue, I haven’t begun it anywhere but here, and only those who still don’t know what I say in it can assert that it contains nothing of what is proper and necessary in a prologue: a reader can’t always get by just by making there be less pages of Literary Art (i.e., that there’s no prologue).

I’m going to enumerate the books that I planned to write when I was twenty-five. I will use a prologue, a few pages to demonstrate how much the public has been spared because the circumstances of my life denied me the means, my pen and ink, for thirty years. The page that gives the public a clear idea is a page well-employed; just as it seems to me that this page is nearly as genial as Maeterlinck’s three-hundred-page eulogy to silence; it’s a pleasure to read any number of pages if they dedicate themselves to sufficiently praising precious Silence. Few virtues merit more than silence the application of the belarte of the Word — Prose — in their recollection and explanation to the public.

The books I was going to write are: A Lawyer’s Health; A Lawyer's Guitar; Theory of Being; Doctrine of Science; Theory of Beauty or the Aesthetic; Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme; Art’s Sophisms; Theory of Effort and its Hedonic Personal Influence; Theory of the Idyll-Tragedy; Tragic Poem; Individualism: A Theory of the State; Critique of Pain; Music as Mere Case of Respiratory Pleasure.

People who understand that pleasure is merely suffering avoided, readers who are part of the public and have the psychological acumen to recognize this as hedonic truth — won’t they hasten to discreetly dissimulate any irritation that reading my present book might cause them, which I modestly give in exchange for all those I didn’t write, considering the amount of reading I’ve spared them in these thirty-five years?

In this way, then, dear reader, an unknown, so notable that in him may be found all the unknowns of the world, has spoken to you in pages that in other authors’ books, which are bound in the usual fashion, would be blank and which in my book, for the first time ever, detain the reader:

To speak about people who have written nothing.