Great Throughts Treasury

"The road to banality is paved with creative intentions. Surprise is not easily defined. It is the unexpected that strikes one with wonder or astonishment. What is curious about effective surprise is that it need not be rare or infrequent or bizarre and is often none of these things. Effective surprises ? seem rather to have the quality of obviousness about them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition following which there is no longer astonishment."

"There is something antic about creating, although the enterprise be serious. And there is a matching antic spirit that goes with writing about it, for if ever there was a silent process, it is the creative one. Antic and serious and silent. Yet there is good reason to inquire about creativity, a reason beyond practicality, for practicality is not a reason but a justification after the fact. The reason is the ancient search of the humanist for the excellence of man: the next creative act may bring man to a new dignity."

"The servant can pattern himself on the master ? and so he did when God was master and Man His servant creating works in His glory ? but the machine is the servant of man, and to pattern one?s function on the machine provides no measure of dignity. The machine is useful, the system in terms of which the machines gain their use is efficient, but what is man?"

"The triumph of effective surprise is that it takes one beyond the common ways of experiencing the world? Creative products have this power of reordering experience and thought in their image. In science, the reordering is much the same from one beholder of a formula to another. In art, the imitation is in part self-imitation. It is the case too that the effective surprise of the creative [person] provides a new instrument for manipulating the world ? physically as with the creation of the wheel or symbolically as with the creation of E = mc2."

"There are certain deep sharings of plight among human beings that make it possible the communication of the artist to the beholder? The artist ? whatever his medium ? must be close enough to these conditions in himself so that they may guide his choice among combinations, provide him with the genuine and protect him from the paste."

"Bruner considers the singular landscape of narrative:"

"Illustration by Dasha Tolstikova from The Jacket by Kirsten Hall"

"The imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily ?true?) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. In contrast to our vast knowledge of how science and logical reasoning proceed, we know precious little in any formal sense about how to make good stories."