I think that all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other self; that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself, something which has no memory and is created in a moment and perpetually renewed. We put on a grotesque or solemn pained face to hide us from the terrors of judgement, invent an imaginative Saturnalia where one forgets reality, a game like that of a child, where one loses the infinite pain of self-realisation.
(...)
If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a[Pg 36] discipline upon ourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as distinguished from the passive acceptance of a code, is therefore theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Memoirs p. 191 (fragment de son journal cité dans Per Amica Silentia Lunae VI p. 35)
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