This book was begun at a time when the threat of an unparalleled disaster hung over the heads of humanity-when a generation only just recuperating from the trauma of the Second World War discovered to its horror that a strange darkness, the portent of a war even more catastrophic and devastating than the last, was already gathering and thickening on the horizon. I began this book in the darkest years of a dictatorship that tyrannized two hundred million people. I began writing it in a prison designated as a «political isolation ward.» I wrote it in secret. I hid the manuscript, and the forces of good-humans and otherwise-concealed it for me during searches. Yet every day I expected the manuscript to be confiscated and destroyed, just as my previous work-work to which I had given ten years of my life and for which I had been consigned to the political isolation ward-had been destroyed.
