... notebooks.

The greatest traveller has still covered but an infinitely small fraction of the world, and so with learning.

—Samuel Butler, Further Extracts from the Note-books of Samuel Butler, edited by A. T. Bartholomew, p. 257.

... a crappy preface to a crappy book.

[Keith Richards] tells the story of growing up on the Dartford Marshes in England among smallpox hospitals, leper colonies, and insane asylums. One day, another kid emerged out of the precipitous atmosphere, skinny with big lips ...

—Nicole Krauss, preface to Best European Fiction 2012, edited by Aleksandar Hemon.

"Precipitous atmosphere"? I don't know if Krauss thinks "precipitous" means "rainy" or what (does she mean Mick emerged out of "the clear blue sky," or possibly just "the rain"?). Even if it could be made to mean something (it can't), this would still be the worst kind of sesquipedalian bombast. A fitting introduction to a book full of stories that are either abominably translated, abominably written and translated with scrupulous fidelity, or (my guess) badly written and no better translated than they deserve.

The acknowledgements cite seventeen "cultural agencies and embassies" who made this book possible.

... part of a postmodern novel.

I know I am sounding less and less like myself. More like—quoi? a nouveau roman perhaps—a borrowed voice. Still one feels lucky to sound like anything at all. To be able to say anything, to feel anything.

—Carole Maso, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat.

... a book about death.

Without suspecting it, we are all living like somnambulists, performing the day's tasks mechanically, blindly, superficially, whether they are purely manual tasks which one could perform with one's eyes closed, or intellectual tasks which demand the most concentrated attention, the most unsleeping vigilance, the intensest application. Even when we grapple with a thought which we are striving to express, we feel, obscurely, that we are thinking of something else; something, we cannot say what, which seems to us far more important.

—Maurice Maeterlinck, Before the Great Silence, translated by Bernard Miall.

... a book.

The joyous task which confronts an ethics of spontaneity, however difficult it may be, is quite literally to woo people out of their armed shells.

—Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West, p. 186.

... an allegorical novel.

Property is robbery; but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organize our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organize our lust and our revenge.

—Samuel Butler, Erewhon, Chapter 12.

... a Stoic's meditation.

Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgement. In short, everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.17, translated by George Long.

... an introduction.

Although he returned home with less than five dollars' worth of gold, be brought back an inexhaustible wealth of experiences—experiences which his artistic genius would now transmute into marketable stories.

—Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, I. Milo Shepard, from the introduction to Short Stories of Jack London.

... a discourse.

What is the punishment of those who do not accept? It is to be what they are.

Is any person dissatisfied with being alone? Let him be alone. Is a man dissatisfied with his parents? Let him be a bad son, and lament. Is he dissatisfied with his children? Let him be a bad father.

"Cast him into prison." What prison? Where he is already, for he is there against his will; and where a man is against his will, there he is in prison.

—Epictetus, Discourses, I.12, translated by George Long.