Unbearable Creativity & Terrible Beauty

Artists cannot simply ignore his charge that our failures are uniquely volatile threats to the social order.

…self-actualization is not enough. Personal salvation and what is good for the person alone cannot be really understood in isolation. The good of other people must be invoked as well as the good for oneself. It is quite clear that purely inter-psychic individualist psychology without reference to other people and social conditions is not adequate.

Elenchus

The antidote is imagination, which is the essence of the inner self. The more imaginative power we have, the more we are able to rethink the world, see beyond the mimetic rivalries that can become so constraining.

Imagination expands the world. Just as economic growth and technological invention create new things in the world—things unknown since the beginning of time—so does language. We live, as the poet Robert Graves said, in a web of language. The bigger our web, the bigger our world.

Facing you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the mighty, glacier-tipped peak, its smooth snowfields and hard-edged rock-faces touched at this moment with soft rose-colour by the last rays of the departing sun, all marvellously sharp against the clear, pale, transparent blue of the sky.According to our usual way of looking at it, everyth... See more