Antiquitopia

There has been seemingly increased discussions of what unites the humanities and the sciences.  One area that seems to unite different branches of knowledge is creativity , as well as a sense of wonder.  In a more limited scope, the ancient historian Robin Lane Fox reflects on the limits and potentials of creativity in historiography versus fiction.  In his Travelling Heroes , he begins with what looks like the basic assumptions of those writing fiction versus those writing history: Novelists, surely, need to imagine, whereas earthbound historians have only to collect as mundane information as survives. (p. 4)  Yet he begins to break down this dichotomy of data gathering versus creative imagination, showing the constraints in fiction and the role of the imagination in history-writing: Yet novelists become constrained by their own creations and by the need for them to be coherent as they develop.  Historians must amass and collect but they then have freedoms...

The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself Affection or Love becomes a State, when divided from Imagination The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State Created to be Annihilated & a new Ratio Created Whatever can be Created can be Annihilated Forms cannot The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife But their Forms Eternal Exist, For-ever. Amen Halle[l]ujah William Blake, Milton: Book the Second , Plate 32 [35]

I am in the middle of teaching Dante's Divine Comedy (the "Divine" purportedly added by Boccaccio), and lines that catch my attention at every reading is in Purgatorio , which, by the way, is my favorite of the three cantica. Of fantasy, you that at times would snatch us so from outward things--we notice nothing although a thousand trumpets sound around us-- who moves you when the senses do not spur you? A light that finds its form in Heaven moves you-- directly or led downward by God's will. Within my fantasy I saw impressed the savagery of one who then, transformed, became the bird that most delights in song; at this, my mind withdrew to the within, to what imagining might bring: no thing that came from the without could enter in. Then into my deep fantasy there rained one who was crucified; and as he died, he showed his savagery and his disdain. (Dante, Purgatorio 17:13-27) In this ode to fantasy, Dante is describing his dreams, but there is something else about...

I can imagine a forger clever enough to imitate another's signature so exactly that a handwriting expert would swear in court that it was genuine, but I cannot imagine a forger so clever that he could imitate his own signature inexactly enough to make a handwriting expert swear that it was a forgery. (Or is it only that I cannot imagine the circumstances in which anyone could want to do such a thing?) (W.H. Auden, Dichtung and Wahrheit X) It is almost like taking Polonius' advice to Laertes in Shakespeare's Hamlet as inevitable: not only "to thine own self be true" but one cannot but be true to oneself. Although one's signature is duplicable, one can only falsify others and not oneself. It is an interesting idea to express in handwriting. Although I am not sure it is true, and, in fact, Auden himself expresses parenthetical doubts that not being able to think of one who could falsify oneself is due to a lack of imagination.