A Note from Both Ends of Time
This volume belongs to the year 2026, but it was born elsewhere—compiled in 1990 from documents that would not be discovered until 2018, which themselves reach back some fifteen centuries into the silence of a noble line.
Time, it seems, prefers to read backward. Each page of this book moves in the direction of its own excavation: newer words uncover older voices, and the latest edition feels—paradoxically—like the most ancient layer of all.
The origins are therefore circular. What began as research ended as memory; what the compilers thought they were preserving may very well have been preserving them. They worked with ink, typewriter ribbons and long patience: weeks of cross-checking signatures traced in crumbling ledgers, months of piecing together a family’s correspondence into something that almost resembled continuity. It was a kind of archaeology that could only happen before the cloud—when paper still listened and keyboards could forget.
You may begin at 1990 and soon find yourself in 1890; turn the page, and fall into a century long passed, then into another where the past thinks about the future that has already written it down. The family whose chronicles unfold within did not know us—but in translating them, the compilers allowed their boundaries to blur, until history became biography and biography turned fiction again.
So proceed carefully, though not suspiciously. The text you hold is both edited and editing itself. It began before it was possible, it ends before it began, and it stands now where all lines converge: the single surface where past and present whisper one another’s names.
“You will find in these pages fragments, trifles, diaries, fables, ditties, sermons and other scraps besides. They do not always match, nor are they obliged to.” Viscountess Vorpel, 1928