Still, though, I can't be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I put it? I sometimes feel that it's too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it, the less I can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it my imagination has invented. I feel as if I've wandered into a labyrinth. Has that ever happened to you?
I used to think I was the strangest person in the world, but then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels flawed and bizarre in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this, know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.
The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn't change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it. She could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing their journeys while she remained seated in her chair.
To me, imagination is about breaking down the walls of a reality of multiple interpretations, and truly opening up your mind to assemble one clear interpretation. Once you have tasted imagination, reality will no longer be enough for you. The line between reality and dreams will become blurred, and then clear, because the line will cease to exist. Once you reach the point of living in imagination, you will truly be free.
My imagination is my everything. I imagined myself as everything, and eventually I found out that the tree is the hardest thing to be, it stays still looking at thieves, burglars, murderers, lovers, haters, friends, families, its can see the truth and know the lies, it can hear the rich and the poor, it's like a judge trying to judge between whose the exploiter and whose the oppressed, and after it will not be heard.
Our age has become so mechanical that this has also affected our recreation. People have gotten used to sitting down and watching a movie, a ball game, a television set. It may be good once in a while, but it certainly is not good all the time. Our own faculties, our imagination, our memory, the ability to do things with our mind and our hands–they need to be exercised. If we become too passive, we get dissatisfied.
The Imagination merely enables us to wander into the darkness of the unknown where, by the dim light of the knowledge we carry, we may glimpse something that seems of interest. But when we bring it out and examine it more closely it usually proves to be only trash whose glitter had caught our attention. Imagination is at once the source of all hope and inspiration but also of frustration. To forget this is to court despair.
His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not.
Do you know what the imagination is, Susan?"The child nodded sagely. "That's when you see things that aren't really there.""Well, not exactly," said Kris with a smile. "No -- to me the imagination is a place all by itself. A very wonderful country. You've heard of the British Nation and the French Nation?"Susan nodded again."Well, this is the Imagination. And once you get there you can do almost anything you want.
Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions... on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.
Katie hated “cutties” and her father’s miserable mutterings of sunken military submarines. She preferred her mother’s tales of her descendants – of legend farrago corn growers singing in shafts of golden sun, or of Rawhunt and Pocahontas making peace with strange coat-men – but Nader wouldn’t allow them to indulge. He had strict rules about what Bea could tell “her daughter”.
Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space — for wilderness and public space — must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.
I worship her, Alyosha, worship her. Only she doesn't see it. No, she still thinks I don't love her enough. And she tortures me, tortures me with her love. The past was nothing! In the past it was only that infernal body of hers that tortured me, but now I've taken all her soul into my soul and through her I've become a man. Will they marry us? If they don't I will die of jealousy. I imagine something every day...
We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.
There it is,” he’d say reverentially. “The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe. [..] Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.
