I.24 — Against This Book

These pages are also things a hand can close around, and that is worth saying outright, in the book's own voice, before the habit of believing settles in unnoticed.

Nothing here is owed belief. Not this sentence, not the one before it, not the chapters still to come. Each claim was built to be run through the test already given (see I.22), and each stands or falls on what that test turns up for the person running it, not on how carefully it was written or how many other pages agree with it.

A page that fails the test is to be set down without apology, the way a tool that does not fit the job is set down. No loyalty is owed to it for having been written first, or written at all. This book would rather be tested chapter by chapter and left half-discarded, with only the parts that held up carried forward, than be swallowed whole and taken the way an answer is taken instead of a claim.

That is not modesty. It is the only honest position available to something asking to be checked rather than trusted. A book that wanted belief would ask for it directly. This one is asking something harder: look, and decide for yourself, even about this page.