The small room under the stairs, a phrase I borrow from the postscript of Anagnostakis, is open to another interpretation, to which I clearly and passionately affirm. It aims at an exercise of the art of discourse that will develop a little off to the side, in the unseen aspect of great stakes (what is poetry doing at the marketplace?), while not denying its public character anywhere; the desire, indeed, to salvage something from the onslaught of trivialization, not as a privilege, supposedly, of the sacred caste of writers and the literary oracle (here let secularization be merciless), but as a new respect that we must achieve towards what we do not know, a new ethics of literature (and not only) that will not be moralizing and where knowledge will not negate man's capacity for wonder, as F. Scott Fitzgerald calls it.

This difficult-to-apply command may have always weighed upon the luggage of the essayist. A whole decade is occupied by the texts that have found their home here. The earliest, the critique of Charalambos Bakirtzis' Prose, was published in 1995 and the latest, the speech for Manolis Anagnostakis, was delivered and published in 2005. After the Relevance to things, these are the only essays I managed to write during this period, which, despite their occasional nature (most were written to be delivered), may perhaps deserve to be reread collected in a volume - if not as texts for study, at least as objects of literary curiosity.

Nevertheless, I insist on the term essay and all its literary and philosophical implications.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]