"Imagination"

 A cold, rainy Saturday allowed me to finish this essay – a diversion from the pervasive divisiveness of the political scene and the scare of the pandemic, neither of which we can ignore or from which we can escape. But we can temper their rough edges by letting loose our imaginations, in order we might see the world of tomorrow in a more favorable light.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Essay from Essex

“Imagination”

December 6, 2020

 

“But real life is only one kind of life –

there is also the life of the imagination.”

                                                                                                            E.B. White (1899-1985)

                                                                                                            Letter, E.B. White to readers of Charlotte’s Web

                                                                                                            1952

 

Within each of us there lies a bit of Walter Mitty. One does not have to be a milquetoast with a demanding spouse to lapse into daydreams, to imagine impossible deeds. It is the creative urge in each of us to reach for something higher, bolder.

 

In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll had Alice, laughing, say to the White Queen: “…one can’t believe in impossible things.” The Queen replies: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Many of yesterday’s impossible dreams are today’s realities, thanks to creative and inventive minds.

 

Watch children when they play alone or with a friend. They make up characters, have them speak and they act out fantasies. It is a learning process that breeds creativity. When my siblings and I were children, besides believing in Santa Claus, my mother told us – and we had no reason to disbelieve her – that the barn animals would converse in English at midnight on Christmas Eve. We never were able to stay awake long enough to discover if she was right, but I have no reason today to believe she fibbed. In The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis wrote: “Shasta stroked its smooth-as-silk nose and said, ‘I wish you could talk, old fellow.’ And then for a second he thought he was dreaming, for quite distinctly, though in a low voice, the Horse said, ‘But I can’” And a friendship was born. In Through the Looking Glass, Alice finds herself in the “Garden of Live Flowers”: “’O Tiger-lily,’ said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, ‘I wish you could talk.’ ‘We can talk,’ said the Tiger-lily, ‘when there is anybody worth talking to.’” Alice passed the test. Children’s imagination has been abetted by authors like Beatrix Potter, Thornton W. Burgess, Kenneth Grahame and E.B. White who anthropomorphized the animals they created. None of us should grow so old or so cynical as not to be touched by Peter Rabbit, Paddy the Beaver, Mr. Toad or Stuart Little.    

 

Writers of fiction, like my daughter-in-law Beatriz Williams, have great doses of imagination that allow them to create believable characters and situations. Their imagination keeps us on edge as their stories unravel. A few go to greater lengths. J.R.R. Tolkien, CS. Lewis and J.K Rowling created whole worlds for their characters – Middle-earth, Narnia and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Miltiades Peterkin Paul, the creation of Charles Remington Talbot (writing as John Brownjohn), lived in his own world, where he performed deeds that finally won him his spurs…and a kiss from his sister Abiathar Ann. 

 

Imagination extends beyond the literary. When I was growing up on a rocky farm in New Hampshire, I often imagined myself as someone I was not. As this was in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, I might be the hero of a U.S. Army raiding party against the Nazis, assaulting a pillbox filled with Japanese soldiers, or a pilot flying through shrapnel to my target in Hamburg. Or, since we had horses and political correctness was not yet discovered, my brother and I would saddle up and hunt Indians or rustlers. We did that, even though we rode “English.” On other occasions, I envied birds, free of gravity’s pull, flying high above, with a vista to me visible inly in my imagination. A call to supper or a reminder of chores awakened us to reality. In Greenwich, while nodding off on a home-bound commuter train, I would imagine I was riding alone in my own private rail carriage, awakening, of course, when someone elbowed me in the ribs. Years later, sculling the marsh rivers of Old Lyme, where all signs of civilization were obscured by the aggressive (and non-native) Phragmite, I would imagine myself a Seventeenth Century explorer, the first to penetrate these waters and this land, until the sound of the Acela crossing the Connecticut River brought me out of my reverie. Even today, when returning to our apartment from the mail room, I walk home along two corridors, imagining this building to be ours, each doorway an apartment where friends have been invited to stay. 

 

It is imagination that led to great works of music and art. Think of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Handel’s “Messiah,” Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and Picasso’s “Guernica.” Michelangelo once said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Imagination, as well, can be sobering. Oscar Wilde, in an 1891 essay “The Critic as Artist,” wrote: “Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” In science, it is imagination that leads to discovery. “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” wrote Albert Einstein, “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Video games are examples of imagination converted to commercial products, which appeal to the imaginative instincts of teenagers. Walt Disney’s Imagineering Department designs and builds their theme park attractions, resorts and games. Almost two hundred years ago, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau told us: “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”

 

Most people are bound by the realities of life – a job, a place to live, the raising of a family, acquiring the necessities to make life bearable. Logic and reason dominate our lives. But we should not forget, as E.B. White reminded us, that there is also the life of the imagination and it is that which fuels our creative juices. We should not keep hidden our Walter Mitty, yearning to be released. It is the imagination that turns a dream into an accomplishment. It is a dream of a better future that drives the immigrant, that causes a student to strive a little harder for that ‘A,’ and that guides the entrepreneur in a search for a new product or service. Dream on!