I am still unsure how I feel about such an undertaking. While I do wish the rising generation would have some knowledge concerning the errors of our age, I also do not wish to force those of tender hearts to wade through the sorrow that did consume our world in those times. In this, I am torn between the desire to protect the curious from both apathy and horror. How can I warn sufficiently of our downfall unless I tell of its consequences? And how can I simply tell of the calamities that befell us without relating the causes? Therefore, I endeavor in this work to provide a history; not a scholar’s history, and certainly not a child’s history. In all respects, I shall try to make it a true history. Let the historians and philosophers work out the problems of our times, all while reclining in the comforts of hindsight. Let them ascribe our age’s downfall to any number of factors, from the Mentite War to the plague and everything else under heaven. However, they cannot glean from all their studies and suppositions the experience forced upon these two eyes or felt by these two hands; they can neither sound the depths of our grief nor summit the heights of our folly.
