Archive for January, 2002

Some Blessed Hope

Tuesday, January 1st, 2002
The Darkling Thrush I LEANT upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky- Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleapt, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse [...]

The Price of Art

Thursday, January 3rd, 2002
Anyone who enjoyed Steppenwolf or Siddhartha should find The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse fascinating. These tales offer considerable insight into Hesse’s philosophy of life. The introduction by Jack Zipes, the translator of the tales, is quite informative about Hesse’s life and philosophical ideas. My favorite tale was “Augustus” which questions whether it is better to [...]

The Courage to Create

Friday, January 4th, 2002
Inspired by Hesse’s tales, I decided to re-read Rollo May’s The Courage to Create. May, an existentialist psychologist, is one of the few modern psychologists that I actually enjoy reading, perhaps because he often sounds more like philosopher than a psychologist or perhaps because he spends as much time exploring exceptional people as he does [...]

The Nature of Creativity and Creativity and the Unconscious

Monday, January 7th, 2002
Rollo May tries to explain not only the nature of creativity but the conditions under which it emerges, relating much of what he says directly to what artists themselves have to say about their art. He sees the creative act as a dialectical relationship that takes place between two poles, the artist and an outside [...]