Interesting book The Life of
What is imagination if not the door to the unknown?
Imagination is a perennial exploration of the immense and endless possibilities of a human being that passes through creativity and wonder.
Imagination presents to the world a big possibility: the one to see a fantastic imaginative project becoming reality.
We do see it everyday. Painters, writers, creatives of all the world tranform their imagination in something that we all later can touch, see, listen, watch, read.
In this particular moment imagination is crucially important because help us to escape somewhere else with our mind, in lands where there is much more peace, at the same time thinking creatively and being more productive because of this mental disconnection with the current events.
Man, also the primitive one, has always desired to leave a trace of himself; in the prehistoric age he created drawings in caves where he lived in; ancestrals and still not too elaborated ones, that, gave us back the idea of his existence.
Modern man meant a biggest complexity and a biggest urgency to him of demonstrating his intelligence, imagination, creativity, for the posterity, but first of all, for himself.
I found interesting the chapter were the existence of little babies is taken under examination with the various phases of development of the brain and consequent good elaboration or better, birth of imagination.
It is also true that imagination in the past has also seen as a negative threat for rationality.
Plato thought that artists were affected by madness; Shakespeare analyzed imaginative distortions that brought sometimes at desperate conclusions, but also Pascal and Descartes developed a negative idea of imagination. Oliver Sacks: "Hallucinations and delusions originating in neurological disturbances, can cause disastrous conflicts with reality."
Another aspect taken in consideration by modern studies is the daydreaming and other pathological conditions.
Imagination is also great because thanks to it we can return to the past, our memories re-elaborated, read under various different lenses. Sometimes imagination could interfer with memory, in particular when crimes are taken in consideration.
Kant focused in the little pleasure and things that can be found, completely free in grade of donating to people pleasure.
Einstein materialized his imagination through... imagines. He called the process: "a rather vague play, a combinatory play and an associative play."
Giotto read the frescos in Assisi to the author as a connection with a world that was ending and the birth of a new one, the Renaissance.
While Frost thought that imagination passed through nature, T.S.Eliot projected in Wasteland all the horror of the first world war, and the uncertainty of the future.
Proust lived an existence characterized by a nasty lung's illness so his imagination and memory transported him in a warm house, in contrast with that outside world to him dangerous sometimes.
Not only: memory brought to the mind of Proust places where he previously lived in and where he would have wanted to return with all himself.
A book plenty of examples from jazz, to cinema, passing through literature, philosophy, poetry, paintings, where creatives expressed their geniality and inconsummensurable talent thanks to a little word that meant the world to them and was, sometimes reason for a crucial escapism in sad times: imagination.
Highly recommended.
I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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