Time

To save time with new visitors who are unfamiliar with the point of view of this site and who want me to engage in discussions, in the comments section I will be placing this note as a mantra:

Before initiating any discussion
I wonder if you have read: this?

It would be great if, in addition to The Fair Race, visitors have also read Hellstorm and the abridged version of The Gulag Archipelago. Only in this way would it be possible for them to understand why I am talking about the darkest hour and begetting the proper gravitas. (In fact, the current subtitle of this blog, ‘The site of a man fused to a weirwood tree’, is a metaphor of seeing the past thanks to these books.)

That said, yesterday I detected a rhetorical failure in The Fair Race, the book of several authors that I compiled. From a strictly literary approach, it is not good to mix my informal comments with formal essays. In a previous edition of The Fair Race I had solved that problem simply by removing all my comments, as well as ‘The Red Giant’ by a Swede also written in informal English.

Now, it seems to me that the solution to such a dilemma is not to eliminate these informal essays, as I did in a previous edition. I will simply have to add a paragraph in the introduction in which I confess that I failed to solve this rhetorical problem. One could imagine that I could have divided the content into two books: one with essays written in formal English and another in informal English. But I wanted to have the POV of this site under a single cover, a single PDF.