Creativity As A Way Of Life


Read every day something no one else is reading. 
Think something no one else is thinking. 
It is bad for the mind to be always a part of unanimity.
    - Christopher Morley

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Below, the most recent Creativity As A Way Of Life post.

The life of a man is and will remain essentially mysterious.

 

The job of the artist is to always deepen the mystery.
      - Francis Bacon

It is what is left over when everything explainable has been explained that makes a story worth writing and reading. The writer's gaze has to extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm of mystery which is the concern of prophets. . . If a writer believes that the life of a man is and will remain essentially mysterious, what he sees on the surface, or what he understands, will be of interest to him only as it leads him into the experience of mystery itself.
- Flannery O'Connor, Literary Witch, Colorado Quarterly (Spring 1962)

As artists, creatives, we explore in an attempt to understand what cannot be understood. What is beauty? What is the real nature of the universe? How do we understand, come to terms with our inner sanctum, our soul and psyche. We do this by exploring the outer reaches of the human enclosure, where the unexpected happens. Where we are pushed to our extremes, and where the beauty of man and the depravity of man is drawn to the surface and revealed.

And we venture into wild nature — wild, untameable creatures and landscapes still resonate with that small residue that remains wild and untameable inside of ourselves. We came from wild nature. A part of our interior world still yearns for the reality out of which we evolved.

It is the job of the artist to celebrate that which cannot be understood, and will never be understood.

The conversation (on Einstein's yacht) drifted from profundities about the nature of God, the universe and man, to lighter questions.  Suddenly, Einstein lifted his head, looked up at the skies and said, "We know nothing about it at all.  Our knowledge is but the knowledge of school children."  "Do you think that we shall ever probe the secret?"  "Possibly," Einstein said with a movement of his shoulders, "we shall know a little more than we do now.  But the real nature of things--that we shall never know, never."
- Ronald Clark, Einstein: The Life And Times