Introduction
Here are sincere pages, born of events and life. Written day by day, they take an image, feeling, and thought at their source, and, with whatever emotion and poetry they may contain, they offer themselves as a testimony.
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Short as they are and sent to the press as soon as they are written, they escape any artifice.
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The title of Essays under which they are proposed comes from a benevolent reader who, bringing his encouragement, qualified them thus.
We hope that these pages emerging from our meditations and sometimes from our entrails retain enough naturalness and freshness to interest and deserve to last.
We publish them as one publishes memories and confidences, with this difference that they have arisen not from our imagination and from the past, but from the song, from the wound, from the event, from the idea, from the shock in its primary resonance.
We deliver them to the reader who has already read one or the other, as well as to those who will read them, with the feeling of making them share with the ripe fruit of our autumn something of our heart, our convictions, and our loves.
Michael Chiha
Beirut, August 15th, 1950