Getting up yourself: how not to write a preface

I couldn't help being struck by two different prefaces, one written by Alain Badiou for the English translation of his Being and Event:

Soon it will have been twenty years since I published this book in France. At that moment I was quite aware of having written a 'great' book of philosophy ... I thought that I had inscribed my name in the history of philosophy ...

And Ernst Bloch in his Traces, who notes in slight contrast:

Just as a detour in life so often turns out not to have been one at...