“There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which comes to mind nearly every day, is the way active and quotidian men smile over poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers imagine, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, to someone with no notion of life’s reality and exact proportions.
This used to irritate me because I supposed, like the naive - and I was naive - that this smiling at the preoccupations with dream and expression sprang from an underlying conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction in the face of something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply an attitude of superiority, today I take it as an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in children a keenness of intellect that surpasses their own, so the smilers recognize in us, who dream and express ourselves, something different and strange that makes them suspicious. I like to think that the smartest among them sometimes detect our superiority, and then smile in a superior way to hide the fact.
But our superiority is not the sort that many dreamers have imagined is theirs. The dreamer is not superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer derives a much vaster and more varied pleasure from life than does the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.
Life being essentially a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider valid, the valuation depends on us. The dreamer is an issuer of bank notes, and the notes he issues circulate in the city of his mind just like real notes. What does it matter to me that the currency of my soul will never be convertible to gold, when there is no gold in life’s factitious alchemy? After us all comes the deluge, but only after us all. Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything’s fictitious, write the novel before it writes them, and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments so as to be able to write in secret.”