knights and princess

This introduction given by RIchard Bach for his novel The Bridge Across Foreever is one of the superb writings i have ever seen so copying it here


We think, sometimes, there’s not a dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess gliding through secret forests, enchanting deer and butterflies with her smile.
We think sometimes that ours is an age of past frontiers, past adventures. Destiny, it’s way over the horizon; glowing shadows galloped past long ago, and gone.
What a pleasure to be wrong. Princess, knights, enchantments and dragons, mystery and adventure…not only are they here-and-now, they are all that ever lived on earth!
Our century, they’ve changed clothes, of course. Dragons wear government-costumes, today, and failure-suits and disaster-outfits. Society demons screech, whirl down on us should we lift eyes from the ground, dare we turn right at corners we’ve been told to turn left. So crafty have appearances become that princesses and knights can be hidden from each other, can be hidden from themselves.
Yet masters of reality still meet us in dreams to tell us that we’ve never lost the shield we need against dragons, that blue-fire voltage arcs through us now to change our world as we wish. Institutions whispers true: we’re not dust, we’re magic!
This is a story about a knight who was dying, and the princess who saved his life. It’s a story about death-powers that seem and life-powers that are. it’s a tale of the one adventure that matters most, I think, in any age.
What’s written here happened in fact very nearly the way it’s turned out in print. I’ve taken a few liberties with chronology, some people in the book are composites, most of the names are fictitious. The rest I couldn’t have invented had I tried; the truth wasn’t plausible enough to have been fiction.
As readers see behind writers’ masks, you’ll see what drove me to put these words on paper. But sometimes, when the light’s just so, writers can see behind readers’ masks, as well. In that light, perhaps I’ll find you and your love walking somewhere along these pages with me and mine.