Post by Jeff on Nov 15, 2005 10:28:01 GMT -5
Hola,
Here is a quote from A.N. Whitehead that might give you a little creative boost. It comes from Lucian Price’s Dialogues of A.N. Whitehead, which is a collection of remembered conversations between the author and my favorite philosopher:
“It often seems to me…that European man was at his best between 1400 and 1600. Since then our appreciation of beauty has become too overlaid with intellectualizing. We educated people have our aesthetic sense too highly cultivated and do not come to beauty simply enough. It is possible that the feeling for beauty is much more true and strong in unschooled people than in ourselves. The early cathedral builders—even the Norman and Romanesque—did not theorize: they built; and the poets went to work much more directly. We of today overelaborate. The only place I see where another great flowering of European culture might come is in the American Middle West, where the start could be fresh and from the ground up…[W]hen it comes to creation, God bless my soul! then forget everything that has ever been done before, and create!” (p63)
Later on Whitehead defines what he means by Middle West as “between the Appalachians and the Rockies… roughly, the Mississippi Basin.” He calls the coasts “transmitters of cultures.” And says that because of this they are likely to be more derivative (p70). He continues…
“Nearly every variety of European man is somewhere in our Midwest… Man’s best thinking is done either by persons living in the country or in small communities, or else by those who, having had such an environment in early life, enrich their experience by life in cities; for what is wanted is contact with the elemental processes of nature during those years of youth when the mind is being formed.
Urbanization is a weakness in much of our modern thinking, especially about social problems. Thought is taken primarily for the cities when perhaps it isn’t the cities that so much matter.”
Cheers!
Jeff
Here is a quote from A.N. Whitehead that might give you a little creative boost. It comes from Lucian Price’s Dialogues of A.N. Whitehead, which is a collection of remembered conversations between the author and my favorite philosopher:
“It often seems to me…that European man was at his best between 1400 and 1600. Since then our appreciation of beauty has become too overlaid with intellectualizing. We educated people have our aesthetic sense too highly cultivated and do not come to beauty simply enough. It is possible that the feeling for beauty is much more true and strong in unschooled people than in ourselves. The early cathedral builders—even the Norman and Romanesque—did not theorize: they built; and the poets went to work much more directly. We of today overelaborate. The only place I see where another great flowering of European culture might come is in the American Middle West, where the start could be fresh and from the ground up…[W]hen it comes to creation, God bless my soul! then forget everything that has ever been done before, and create!” (p63)
Later on Whitehead defines what he means by Middle West as “between the Appalachians and the Rockies… roughly, the Mississippi Basin.” He calls the coasts “transmitters of cultures.” And says that because of this they are likely to be more derivative (p70). He continues…
“Nearly every variety of European man is somewhere in our Midwest… Man’s best thinking is done either by persons living in the country or in small communities, or else by those who, having had such an environment in early life, enrich their experience by life in cities; for what is wanted is contact with the elemental processes of nature during those years of youth when the mind is being formed.
Urbanization is a weakness in much of our modern thinking, especially about social problems. Thought is taken primarily for the cities when perhaps it isn’t the cities that so much matter.”
Cheers!
Jeff
