I've just started using one with a rather striking picture of the young Albert Einstein on it. Can't remember where I got it from. It's more than a little disconcerting to find oneself under the scrutiny of that masterful gaze when one is reading.
The bookmark also bears the legend Imagination is more important than knowledge, as uttered by the physicist, presumably not aware of the fact that most folk don't know much at all but have a fine capacity for day-dreaming. No wonder it's become such a popular saying: an easy way out from any real thinking at all.
4 comments:
Presumably he was referring to his habit of carrying out thought-experiments, though. :)
"Focussed imagination is more important than unconsidered knowledge," however, is less catchy.
I like focussed imagination. Sometimes I've been known to throw disciplined imagination into discussions and watch the puzzled expressions that follow.
Completely off the point, but Joyce (James) always claimed to have no imagination.
Ah, but then the gift of Joyce is to awaken the ability of the reader to 'imaginate' — that is, to see images of stuff you wouldn't otherwise see. His Dubliners puts me in a Dublin I've never been to, ever. I am left with no doubts that Dublin is (was) like that.
Spot on. And Joyce pulls off that strange thing of finding the universal in the particular. His Dublin is like nowhere else, but it's every city. I've always seen Manchester in there. And, oddly, Singapore.
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