Believe in Miracles
A stranger recommended a book that has really knocked my socks off. Robert Grudin’s The Grace of Great Things is a terrific philosophical consideration of the the mind approaching insight. I’d like to share a few gems here without commentary in hopes of not spoiling his prose.
“Modern idioms unfairly compartmentalize the process of thought. To say that we ‘had an idea’ or ‘solved a problem’ or ‘worked something out’ is to imply that mind as discrete ‘subject’ handles idea as discrete ‘object.’ Such idioms suggest a mechanical relation between mind and idea, one in which too much emphasis is put on conscious effort and too little on openness and receptivity. Accepting this model, we visualize creativity in terms of dominance and control, as though thinking were a kind of warfare or business.
“Such a view is both inaccurate and inhibiting. We no more ‘have’ ideas than ideas ‘have’ us, and indeed the creative process might be simplified if we stop searching for ideas and simply made room for them to visit. If anything controls or dominates at the moment of inspiration, it is not the mind but the idea, or rather, the suddenly articulated power of our own inner energies. New ideas capture and possess the mind that births them; they colonize it and renew its laws. The expansion of any idea is that also an expansion of self.”
“Why is inspiration given to some people and withheld from others? The keyword in our ancient definition is ‘deserving.’ All inspired individuals are, in someway, prepared for the experience. A corporate lawyer, unstudied in math beyond simple arithmetic, cannot expect sudden revelations about non-Euclidean geometry; a football player, dreamily jetting home from a road game, is unlikely to be visited by new insights into the gasification of oil. If inspiration is indeed an abandonment and a transcendence, it is nonetheless impossible without groaning effort without the painful winning of skill. Here, as before, inspiration suggests the combination of an active principal — hard earned expertise — with a passive principle — unencumbered and trustful receptivity.”
“Nothing stifles the spirit of discovery more effectively than the assumption that miracles have ceased. In other words, most people do not make discoveries because they do not expect to. Discovery has in it not only exacting precision but absurd aspiration; it weighs hairs and expect miracles.”