明 WHAT HEAVEN CONFERS: The dreamers are the saviors of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity cannot forget it's dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which it shall one day see and know. Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the afterworld, the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they exist. 子 I want to consider the possibility that every age has an extremely small fraction of people who go their own way without making a big production of it: not Jean-Paul Sartre, but Boris Vian; not Goethe, but Heinrich von Kliest; not Martin Heidegger, but Ludwig Wittgenstein. these are bohemians with a small b, in other words; their work breaks with fixed forms, and it is often about the idea of breaking with fixed forms. yet they do not try to elevate their iconoclasm into a movement, a new fixed form. In his book Class, Paul Fussell calls this group "class X," but since this group, for the most part, has very little in common with Generation X, I am going to substitute the acronym NMI, the new monastic individual. NMIs, says Fussell, make up the class of people that belong to no class, have no membership in a heirarchy. they form a kind of "unmonied aristocracy," free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called "work." they work very hard, in fact, but as they love their work and do it for its intrinsic interest, this work is not much different from play. in the context of contemporary american culture, such people are an anomaly, for they have no interest in the world of business success and mass consumerism. their credo, if it could be formulated at all, most clearly approximates a haiku by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho: Journeying through the world to and fro, to and fro cultivating a small field www . drea - ming . com