Foreseeing that I must soon address humanity with the most difficult demand ever placed upon it, I find it necessary to say who I am. Deep down, this should already be known, for I am not one of those who have left no 'testimony'.

However, the disproportion between the great scale of my undertaking and the smallness of my contemporaries has expressed itself in the fact that neither has anyone ever heard me nor seen me. I live on the credit I have given myself; it may simply be a prejudice that I live...

It is enough for me to speak with one of the 'educated' who come to Ober Engadin in the summer to believe that I do not live... Under these circumstances, there is a duty against which my habits rebel deeply, and even more so the pride of my instincts, namely the duty to say: Listen to me! Because I am this and that. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else!

[Excerpt from the text of the preface]