The Educated Imagination
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- Author: Unknown
Highlights
But whether your point of view is Western or Eastern, intellect and emotion never get together in your mind as long as you’re simply looking at the world. They alternate, and keep you divided between them. — location: 54
The world you want to live in is a human world, not an objective one: it’s not an environment but a home; it’s not the world you see but the world you build out of what you see. You go to work to build a shelter or plant a garden, and as soon as you start to work you’ve moved into a different level of human life. You’re not separating only yourself from nature now, but constructing a human world and separating it from the rest of the world. Your intellect and emotions are now both engaged in the same activity, so there’s no longer any real distinction between them. — location: 70
You can see why we tend to think of the sciences as intellectual and the arts as emotional: one starts with the world as it is, the other with the world we want to have. — location: 115
The world of literature is human in shape, a world where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west over the edge of a flat earth in three dimensions, where the primary realities are not atoms or electrons but bodies, and the primary forces not energy or gravitation but love and death and passion and joy. — location: 156
and poetry, according to Milton, who ought to have known, is “more simple, sensuous and passionate” than philosophy or science. — location: 161
as religion, but they indicate what the limits of the imagination are. They — location: 176
not so much a desire to fly as a rebellion against the tyranny of time and space. — location: 179
What Stevens calls the weight of primary noon, the A B C of being, and the dominant x is the objective world, the world set over against us. Outside literature, the main motive for writing is to describe this world. But literature itself uses language in a way which associates our minds with it. As soon as you use associative language, you begin using figures of speech. — location: 187
but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind. So he produces what Baudelaire called a “suggestive magic including at the same time object and subject, the world outside the artist and the artist himself.” The motive for metaphor, according to Wallace Stevens, is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know. — location: 199
I’m saying that they are all products of an impulse to identify human and natural worlds; that they’re really metaphors, and become purely metaphors, part of the language of poetry, as soon as they cease to be beliefs, or even sooner. — location: 222
Comedies derive from the phase in which god and goddess are happy wedded lovers; tragedies from the phase in which the lover is cast off and killed while the white goddess renews her youth and waits for another round of victims. — location: 345
This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature. Inside it comes the story of the hero with a thousand faces, as one critic calls him, whose adventures, death, disappearance and marriage or resurrection are the focal points of what later become romance and tragedy and satire and comedy in fiction, and the emotional moods that take their place in such forms as the lyric, which normally doesn’t tell a story. — location: 367
The poet’s job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place. He gives you the typical, recurring, or what Aristotle calls universal event. — location: 408
This allusiveness in literature is significant, because it shows what we’ve been saying all along, that in literature you don’t just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. — location: 461
The flowers become poetic flowers as soon as they’re identified with a human mind. Here we have an image from the natural world, a field of daffodils: it’s enclosed inside the human mind, which puts it into the world of the imagination, and the sense of human vision and emotion radiating — location: 482
a world in which roses and worms are so completely surrounded and possessed by the human mind that whatever goes on between them is identical with something going on in human life. — location: 517
I spoke of the magic in Blake’s poem: that’s usually a very vague word in criticism, but magic is really a belief in identity of the same kind: the magician makes a wax image of somebody he doesn’t like, sticks a pin in it, and the person it’s identified with gets a pain. The poet, too, is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life. — location: 523
Proust says that our ordinary experience, where everything dissolves into the past and where we never know what’s coming next, can’t give us any sense of reality, although we call it real life. In ordinary experience we’re all in the position of a dog in a library, surrounded by a world of meaning in plain sight that we don’t even know is there. Proust tells an immense long story that meanders through the life of France from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the First World War, a story held together by certain recurring themes and experiences. Most of the story is a record of the jealousies and perversions and hypocrisies of “real life,” but there are occasional glimpses of an ecstasy and serenity infinitely beyond them. At the end of the series of books Proust explains (or at least his narrator explains) how one such experience takes him outside his ordinary life and also outside the time he is living it in. This is what enables him to write his book, because it makes it possible for him to look at men, not as living from moment to disappearing moment, but as “giants immersed in time.” — location: 554
The critic’s function is to interpret every work of literature in the light of all the literature he knows, to keep constantly struggling to understand what literature as a whole is about. Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell. Literature is a human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind. — location: 764
This is an example of why the humanists have always insisted that you don’t learn to think wholly from one language: you learn to think better from linguistic conflict, from bouncing one language off another. — location: 865
Everything man does that’s worth doing is some kind of construction, and the imagination is the constructive power of the mind set free to work on pure construction, construction for its own sake. The units don’t have to be words; they can be numbers or tones or colours or bricks or pieces of marble. It’s hardly possible to understand what the imagination is doing with words without seeing how it operates with some of these other units. — location: 870
Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. — location: 884
But it said one thing that was true. We’re often told that to write we must have something to say, but that in its turn means having a certain potential of verbal energy. — location: 899
Nobody can remember the names and dates of battles unless they make some appeal to the imagination: that is, unless there is some literary reason for doing so. Everything that happens in time vanishes in time: it’s only the imagination that, like Proust, whom I quoted earlier, can see men as “giants in time.” — location: 927
literature, being one of the arts, is concerned with the home and not the environment of man: it lives in a simple, man-centred world and describes the nature around it in the kind of associative language that relates it to human concerns. — location: 931
The illusion is itself produced by the social imagination, of course, but it’s an inverted form of imagination. What it creates is the imaginary, which as I said earlier is different from the imaginative. — location: 1049
one central element is a sense of claustrophobia that the imagination develops when it isn’t allowed to function properly. — location: 1102
The area of ordinary speech, as I see it, is a battleground between two forms of social speech, the speech of a mob and the speech of a free society. — location: 1111
No psychiatrist or clergyman can do him any good, because his state of mind is neither sick nor sinful: he’s wrestling with his angel. He discovers immediately that he wants more education, and he wants it in the same way that a starving man wants food. But he wants education of a particular kind. His intelligence and emotions may quite well be in fine shape. It’s his imagination that’s been starved and fed on shadows, and it’s education in that that he specifically wants and needs. — location: 1132
One is around us, the other is a vision inside our minds, born and fostered by the imagination,yet real enough for us to try to make the world we see conform to its shape. This second world is the world we want to live in, but the word “want” is now appealing to something impersonal and unselfish in us. Nobody can enter a profession unless he makes at least a gesture recognizing the ideal existence of a world beyond his own interests: a world of health for the doctor, of justice for the lawyer, of peace for the social worker, a redeemed world for the clergyman, and so on. — location: 1143
Arnold called this ideal environment culture, and defined culture as the best that has been thought and said. The word culture has different overtones to most of us, but Arnold’s conception is a very important one, and I need it at this point. We live, then, in both a social and a cultural environment, and only the cultural environment, the world we study in the arts and sciences, can provide the kind of standards and values we need if we’re to do anything better than adjust. — location: 1162
Every time we use words, we’re either fighting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we’re taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization. — location: 1173
This power is the imagination, and these studies are its products. When we think of their content, they’re bodies of knowledge; when we think of their form, they’re myths, that is, imaginative verbal structures. So the whole subject of the use of words revolves around this constructive power itself, as it operates in the art of words, which is literature, the laboratory where myths themselves are studied and experimented with. — location: 1177
What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. — location: 1185