A Reader's Pact

Most books make no promises about what they will cost you. This one does.

This book asks you to question things that have organized your life. Some of those things will turn out to have been wrong, or hollow, or no longer yours. You may finish a chapter and realize that a job you have held for a decade is the wrong job, or that a relationship you have considered foundational rests on a story neither of you believes anymore, or that the version of yourself you have been performing was one you adopted without ever choosing. This is the real cost of the book. I want you to know it before you start.

I will not pretend to have arrived. You will not either, by the end. Books that promise arrival are dishonest about how being human actually works. The lostness recurs. The seeking continues. The most this book can offer is a clearer way to walk one cycle of the spiral, written by a person who is, as he is writing, walking his.

In return for the cost, I ask one thing. Read the book to the last sentence of the Epilogue. Not the second-to-last. Not the page that says THE END. The last sentence of the Epilogue. The argument of this book is not finished until that sentence has been read, and I will be unable to defend any earlier sentence to you if that one has not.

That is the pact.