To All the Introductions I’ve Loved Before

I always read introductions. There seems to be this popular idea in America that any text is comprehensible without prerequisite knowledge or proper framing. This is also coupled with the idea that introductions will somehow “spoil” a work—the notion that all a story is good for are its spectacles and surprises (a pretty shallow appreciation of narratives, especially considering nearly all of said surprises have been done to death). I never quite understood this myself. I don’t know where anyone gets this idea that they’ll just understand a work without any additional rigging to help them—it’s similar to a belief that one can and should climb a mountain without equipment. I would not be surprised if adherents of this philosophy also don’t look up definitions for words they don’t know but probably just breeze over them. It’s laziness! There’s a lot that goes into crafting a quality interpretation of a text, this includes a great deal of theoretical exploration, and historical tidbits that aren’t covered in the text itself. And no, reading an introduction does not somehow make your experience of the work “impure” nor are you bound to blindly accepting everything an introduction claims is important as such—in fact you may find through your reading that what the introductory text emphasized seemed in fact wholly irrelevant to the work (in which case you might consider it a poor introduction).

Obviously if you’re reading strictly with the intention of passing time/being entertained and not with the intention of understanding or comprehending what you’re reading and experiencing through the text, I can see why you might skip the intro.

A lot of fairly dry computer books have touching, emotional, wonderful introductions. Shaw's prefaces are usually longer and more interesting than the plays they precede. G.K. Chesterton wrote a book on Shaw, a close friend, to which this was the entire introduction:

MOST people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do not agree with him.

G. K. C.

My favourite preface is to Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, which is savagely funny, categorizing the types of critic and introducing art for art's sake to combat the 'utilitarian critic' who complains of art not being useful.

There is a song "to all the girls i've loved before" https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lf-RGql11Xg

I read introductions but usually only after I've read the work that they are 'introducing'.