Imagination and the Power of Creative Thought

The other day, my oldest son started doodling on a piece of paper. He created shapes one by one with random strokes of his pencil, studied them to determine what they could become, and then filled in the gaps to make something recognizable out of those shapes. As I recall, he made a camel-bunny, a cy-fish (cyclops fish), a ghost waving hi, and about a dozen other odd creatures. As I watched him, I thought what an amazing power our imagination is. We can look at a real object and "see" something that isn't there. We can then manipulate our environment to create in the real world what we see in our mind. The power of creativity is amazing. Where did that power come from? It seems to me like a divine trait.

Architects employ their creativity to see a structure of wood, concrete, steel, and other materials where nothing exists; they capture that image piece by piece on paper or computer; and they work to see that image created out of raw materials. Pretty cool, huh? I recently read a book called "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand in which the hero, Howard Roark, as an architect, is the prototypical creative man and she captures that creative power of his very nicely. The book's virtue isn't limited to its depiction of creativity, but that's one area where her passion really shines through.



Be careful with Ayn Rand - I can't agree with her philosophy on sexuality, but I found Fountainhead to be an excellent read. I had read her "Atlas Shrugged" years ago and I loved it and hated it. There was very little in Fountainhead that I didn't like. In my opinion, Roark was much closer to what a hero should be than the hero in Atlas. I was reading Emerson about the same time and I found some interesting similarities between his philosophy and Rand's depiction of Roark. Of particular interest was Emerson's "Self Reliance" - a great essay.