A Balancing Act
I’m new at this whole sharing thoughts with the entire internet thing, so bear with me.
“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.”
-Gilbert Highet
I learned about Gilbert Highet today– he said all sorts of amazing things, such as
“The mind never need stop growing. Indeed, one of the few experiences which never pall is the experience of watching one’s own mind and how it produces new interests, responds to new stimuli, and develops new thoughts, apparently without effort and almost independently of one’s own conscious control.”
and
“By taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.”
*Edit***
Pat rightly pointed out that I need to say a little bit more when I’m going about this sort of thing.
Gilbert Highet was a Humanities teacher at Columbia, from roughly 1937- 1970ish. You can read about him here: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2001/Highet.html
One of the more exciting things that I thought about when reading about him was how he tried to apply classic stories, characters, and morals to real life.
The above quotes really speak to me in particular because of my difficult of separating reality from the inner brain thoughts of dreams/fiction/fantasy. That’s a theme that crops up often in my work– trying to balance the need to deal with everyday things ( job, food, etc.) and getting caught up in thoughts about existence, the nature of reality, and other impractical things. Hence the drawing of a chicken-creature standing on top of someone’s head.