Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Machen

Machen opens by pretending he has no right to open at all. The sentence is a small performance of self-erasure: introductions are reserved for “masterpieces and classics,” for works already embalmed by consensus, and yet here he is, committing the minor impertinence of ushering in a “short, small story” that ran in a daily paper. The modesty is too carefully arranged to be merely modest. It’s a sly bid for seriousness through the back door: by invoking the cathedral hush of “the great and ancient and accepted things,” he puts that atmosphere in the room, then contrasts it with the disposable churn of newsprint. The joke flatters the reader (we’re in on the etiquette) while also quietly challenging the hierarchy that makes an “Evening News” story seem unworthy of ceremony.

The subtext is Machen’s perennial anxiety and ambition: the occult, the strange, the spiritually charged can arrive in cheap formats and still deserve the framing devices of literature. Calling the story “my own” after listing what “belongs” to the canon also signals a friction between institutional prestige and personal authorship. He knows the canon is a social agreement as much as an artistic one, “accepted” before it is necessarily experienced.

Contextually, this is a writer who spent his career slipping the uncanny into respectable rooms. The introduction becomes a threshold ritual: he’s not just presenting a text, he’s asking permission to treat the ephemeral as if it might last - and daring you to notice how arbitrary the border is.