Whenever my ambition, influenced by my dreams, raised up above the everyday level of my life, so that for a moment I seemed to soar, like a child on a swing, I always – like the child – had to come down to the public garden and face my defeat, with no flags to wave in battle and no sword I was strong enough to unsheathe.

I suppose that most of the people I chance to pass in the street also feel – I notice it in their silently moving lips and in their eyes’ vague uncertainty, or in the sometimes raised voice of their joint mumbling – like a flagless army fighting a hopeless war. And probably all of them – I turn around to see their slumping, defeated-looking shoulders – share with me this sense of salesmanly squalor, of being no more than humiliatingly vanquished stragglers amid reeds and scum, with no moonlight over the shores or poetry in the marshes.

Like me, they have an exalted and sad heart. I know them all. Some are shop assistants, others are office workers, and still others are small businessmen. Then there are the conquerors from the bars and cafés, unwittingly sublime in the ecstasy of their self-centred chatter, or content to remain self-centredly silent, with no need to defend what they’re too stingy to say. But they’re all poets, poor devils, who drag past my eyes, as I drag past theirs, the same sorry sight of our common incongruity. They all have, like me, their future in the past. At this very moment, idle and alone in the office, because everyone else went to lunch, I’m staring through the grimy window at an old man who’s slowly teetering down the other side of the street. He’s not drunk; he’s dreaming. He’s attentive to what doesn’t exist. Perhaps he still hopes. If there’s any justice in the Gods’ injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they’re impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they’re trivial. Today, because I’m still young, I can dream of South Sea islands and impossible Indias. Tomorrow perhaps the same Gods will make me dream of owning a small tobacco shop, or of retiring to a house in the suburbs. Every dream is the same dream, for they’re all dreams. Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming.

While thinking about this, I forgot about the old man. Now I don’t see him. I open the window to get a better look, but he’s not there. He left. For me he had the visual mission of a symbol; having finished his mission, he turned the corner. If I were told that he’d turned the absolute corner and was never here, I would accept it with the same gesture I’m about to employ to close the window.

Succeed?…

Poor salesmanly demigods who conquer empires with lofty words and intentions but need to scrounge up money for food and the rent! They’re like the troops of a disbanded army whose commanders had a glorious dream, which in them – now trudging through the scum of marshes – has been reduced to a vague notion of grandeur, the consciousness of having belonged to an army, and the vacuity of not even knowing what the commander they never saw had ever done.

Each of them, for a moment, has dreamed he’s the commander of the army whose rear guard he deserted. Each of them, from the sludge of streams, has hailed the victory which no one could win and which left only crumbs on the stained tablecloth that nobody remembered to shake.

They fill in the cracks of daily activity like dust in the cracks of badly dusted furniture. In normal, ordinary daylight they shine like grey worms against the reddish mahogany. They can be removed with a thin nail, but no one has the patience to bother.

My hapless peers with their lofty dreams – how I envy and despise them! I’m with the others, with the even more hapless, who have no one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I’m with these poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature besides their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

Some are heroes who flattened five men on a street corner just yesterday. Others are seducers to whom even non-existent women have surrendered. They believe these things when they tell them, and perhaps they tell them so as to believe. Others ..... For them the world’s conquerors, whoever they may be, are everyday people. And like eels in a wooden tub, they slither under and over each other, without ever leaving the tub. Sometimes they’re mentioned in the newspapers. Some of them are mentioned rather often. But they never become famous.

These people are happy, for they’ve been given the enchanted dream of stupidity. But those, like me, who’ve been given dreams without illusions .....