Every Preface Is More or Less Useless

Every preface is more or less useless, and because that is the norm, it is natural that, from the very first line, it tends to bore the reader. In other words: if something really important is to be said about the work, let it be said there. However, the practice legitimizes prefaces, even if they rarely prove useful. But there are prefaces, God!, there are prefaces which, not satisfied with their own uselessness, want to jeopardize the work that has not even begun! There is nothing more annoying than this idle display of erudition, which fills the lines with foreign terms and pretends to express a depth that the work itself is incapable of. We read them and we feel imbued with an immediate and one hundred percent unnecessary antipathy towards the author. The question is: why, God, why?