It is for the active-minded people who enjoy doing their own thinking as well as watching the author do his, that I have put this volume together. When life speaks to them, their hearts answer, as a friend to a friend. They are my brothers and my sisters. They practise the delight-giving art of being their own authors. They know the familiar, exquisite interest of trying to arrange in coherence the raw material which life constantly washes up to every one in great flooding masses. And they do this for their own high pleasure, with no idea of profiting by it in the eyes of the world. They work to create order out of chaos with a single-hearted effort, impossible to poor authors, tortured by the aching need to get the results of their efforts into words intelligible to others. Being useful in other ways to the world, it is quite permissible for them to indulge in what was pernicious self-indulgence for an artist like Wencelas Steinbock. They are good children who, having nourished themselves on the substantial food of useful work, may eat candy without risking indigestion. The artist’s work is the fatiguing attempt to transform the wonder of life into art! Those other disinterested observers of life, those wise, deeply pondering, far-seeing men and women, driven by their own need to make something understandable out of our tangled life, struggle, just as the artist does, to piece together what they see into intelligible order. But they do this in their own hearts, for their own satisfaction. How singularly free-handed and open-hearted and generous their attitude seems, compared to the artist’s frugal, not to say penurious, not to say avaricious, anxiety to utilize every scrap of his life as raw material for his art. Such people have, as the reward for their disinterested attitude of mind, all the pleasures of the creative artist’s life and none of its terrible pains. All the pleasure, that is, except the dubious one of seeing themselves in print. This is--for me at least--a pleasure deeply colored with humiliation. The stuff which I manage to get into a printed book is so tragically dry and lifeless compared to the vibrating, ordered, succulent life which goes on inside my head before I put pen to paper! For my part, I envy the clever, happy people who are content to let it stay in their heads, and never try to decant it into a book, only to find that the bouquet and aroma are all gone. I quite sympathize with them when they are impatient with the verbose literal-minded garrulity with which most writers of fiction spread out clumsily over two pages that which takes but a flash to think or to feel. They think, and quite rightly, that what is slowly written out in the inaccurate, halting system we call language, bears little relation to the arrow-swift movements of the thinking mind and feeling heart.