"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!

"More Statues, Not Fewer"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“More Statues, Not Fewer”

June 28, 2020

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny

and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

                                                                                                George Orwell (1903-1950)

                                                                                                1984, 1949

Statues and monuments are erected not just to honor an individual but as reminders we did not just appear, that we descend not just from our parents and grandparents but from a past and a culture that gave rise to the country in which we live. Despite nihilist messages from Black Lives Matter (BLM), we in America are fortunate. Most nations are not as free as this and none have seen so many “rags to riches” stories. Much of the world lives under totalitarian regimes, and the fact that global poverty has shrunk is (largely) due to the creative genius, entrepreneurial spirit and generosity of Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently Tweeted, “America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you.”   

Evolution is a slow process. Life, according to most scientists, began about four billion years ago, primates about a hundred million years ago and humanoids perhaps twenty million years ago. Over the millennia, evolution provided natural selection that allowed our ancestors to survive and gave us inherited traits that permitted us to develop as individuals. It took millions of years for man to live communally and even longer to reach the age of Enlightenment, when concepts of self-government, rule of law, equal justice and individual liberty emerged. Throughout most of history, man fought – generally over land or religion. Today, we are indebted, in terms of liberty, democracy and markets to men like Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Galileo, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and Adam Smith. Their ideas, many based on the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans, developed in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries. The United States Constitution, when adopted in 1788, served as their laboratory. We are still being tested.

Civilizations in other places have materialized and dissipated: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India, Mexico and Peru. All collapsed. None offered the universal freedom and respect for the individual’s rights embedded in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in 1776. One can find fault in the Declaration, as its soaring rhetoric did not include women, and slavery was still a fact of life. Nevertheless, it was a revolutionary document. And it should be judged against customs and standards of the time. How free were women in England, Germany, China or Japan at that time? Slavery, then, existed most everywhere, including Africa, and it still does in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Context counts when passing judgement on past lives and customs.

A genius of the Founding Fathers was their creation of a government with limited power, a concept necessary for liberty, but one fragile, as it conflicts with man’s instinct for power. They gave us a government that permits free speech, the right to assemble and to protest. We have the freedom to worship as we may. In terms of behavior, we have rights to march, but we also have property rights and the right to defend what is ours. We have a government based on the rule of law, not men, and that relies on civility, tolerance and mutual respect, designed to hear diverse opinions. It has worked for almost 250 years. We must keep it. Its strength is not its military; it is not a powerful executive or a wise judicial branch. Its strength is its people, whose collective wisdom is gained through independent thinking, not propaganda that stems from “group think,” where illiberal ideas today are nurtured in universities, promoted by the media, supported by the entertainment and sports world and executed by government bureaucrats.

We live in a frightening time. In the name of inclusion and diversity, we exclude those whose opinions differ from what has been sanctioned by the “thought police.” In seeking diversity of skin color and sex, we get conformity of ideas that demand allegiance to the “Party.” We have fomented a culture that “cancels” history and divides people into victims and oppressors. Through BLM and terrorist groups like Antifa, and our willing acceptance of their demands, we are led away from liberty into the darkness of totalitarianism. What is happening is manifested in mobs that desecrate and tear down remnants of our past. Writing in The Times of London last week, Gerard Baker noted: “It’s still surprisingly little understood that BLM wants a revolution: defunding the police, dismantling the institutions of capitalism and white supremacy.” We see elected officials, who forego responsibility to public safety and bow to mob demands. Recently, we witnessed the Speaker of the House and other congressional Democrats don Ghanian Kente cloth scarfs and kneel on the Capitol steps, in eight minutes and forty-six seconds of hypocritical silence to a man who should not have died as he did. This desire to be “woke” extended to the Head of my old school. In a recent e-mail, he called for inclusion and an end to hate speech and racism, while saying nothing of the need for excellence in scholarship, or the right of free speech, including diversity of opinion.  “The racial divide,” as Victor Davis Hanson wrote two weeks ago, “will not be healed by black separatist tribalism.”

Of course, Black lives matter, including that of George Floyd, but also the 97% of Black murder victims who, according to the Washington Post, were killed by other Blacks in 2015. As well, we pray that the lives of the 70% of Black children born every year into father-less families will matter. In truth, all lives matter, just as all voices need to be heard, not just those in fashion. But those who tear down monuments and destroy history remove any sense of how man has changed over time. Ours is a troubled era. We need voices to call out: Slow down and think about what is being said and done! In a speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois in 1838, a twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln spoke: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Evil needs to be suppressed, even when done by those who profess to be doing good.

What is needed is a positive message of universal affirmation, that acknowledges imperfections but is not ashamed of who we are and what has been accomplished. We need more monuments and statues, not fewer. We need them of recent heroes, like Thurgood Marshall and Edward Brooke, to add to those erected yesterday. It allows our descendants to see how we evolve toward a fairer, freer and more equitable society.

And we must keep in mind that every sculpture and monument is a work of art. Michelangelo once said: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Whether the four faces on Mount Rushmore represent the four greatest Americans who ever lived is a matter of personal opinion. But we can all admire the talent and effort of Gutzon Borglum in producing that monument. My parents were sculptors. They worked in marble, granite and clay. They produced what they thought was (and is) beautiful. Politics never entered the equation. Most of what they produced was small – busts of children and statuettes of horses. My father did, however, carve a Madonna and Child from a granite rock. It now sits outside my brother’s bookstore, the Toadstool, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a symbol of serenity and love – something missing in today’s fractured world.