Contemporary literary theory has induced enough skepticism about the notion of a preface that one is inclined to abandon the attempt to write one. Yet the urge to communicate prevails over inevitable reservations. If anything has been learned, it is perhaps that all books are in the manner of a preface, an insight that Kierkegaard alone carried through in a book composed wholly of prefaces. One remains always in the mode of a pre-face, wanting to say what must be said before one faces the reader but never actually managing to say it. Indeed, the entire book is an ample demonstration of that failure, for if communication were as simple as saying what is on our minds, there would hardly arise the need to elaborate our thought in books. In that sense the operative assumption of all book writing is that the task can never reach its end. The book goes on, and all that is produced is merely a preface to what remains to come. Books, too, partake of the “between” character of existence, and although we impose a limit on them, they immediately overflow the boundaries in every direction. We are back in the end at the acknowledgment that we have not reached the end. We have only a preface, which must be offered in the knowledge that we have fortunately not been able to say what we sought to say. The saying can go on.