The flip is a question you can run without the novel. List what made the last seven days count. If the list has one entry, you are not looking at a fate. You are looking at a license. Revoke it for a week and watch which channels try to refile themselves as phantoms — the chore, the post, the friend who is fine without your intensity, the second wish. The preface does the honest thing and the dangerous thing in one sentence: it tells the reader who suffers the same distress to use this book as the dearer companion they lack. That is the sole converter changing hands. Ripped from the novel: "And thou, good soul, who sufferest the same distress as he endured once, draw comfort from his sorrows; and let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion."

— In our words · Source: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)