Topical Guide 214
Mark Dorset
Imagination
So, I stopped writing Larry Peters stories, but I didn’t stop thinking about writing them, and as a result the time I spent in bed before I fell asleep became, for me even more than for most adolescents, a time of guilty pleasures, when my thoughts would turn both to girls and to stories. …
Not only did I have to bear all the fearful guilt derived from my awakening interest in sex, but I had a growing load of guilt from my awakening interest in my imagination, and that, I could see, was potentially far more dangerous an obsession. … The universe of the imagination expands much faster than the physical universe. Even at eleven, I could see that my imagination was, much like the foggy future of the Tars, a place without visible boundaries, perhaps with no boundaries at all, a place where I could get lost if I wasn’t careful. My wanderings there, most often while concocting a Larry Peters story, were thrilling but sometimes frightened me a little.Little Follies, “The Young Tars”
We then conversed on various matters for nearly an hour; and my impression of this young man’s natural ability was confirmed and heightened. But it was an ability as wrong and perverse in its directions or instincts as a French novelist’s. He seemed to have, to a high degree, the harder portion of the reasoning faculty, but to be almost wholly without the arch beautifier of character, that sweet purifier of mere intellect—the imagination. For, though we are too much taught to be on our guard against imagination, I hold it, with [my uncle] Captain Roland, to be the divinest kind of reason we possess, and the one that leads us the least astray. In youth, indeed, it occasions errors, but they are not of a sordid or debasing nature. Newton says that one final effect of the comets is to recruit the seas and the planets by a condensation of the vapors and exhalations therein; and so even the erratic flashes of an imagination really healthful and vigorous deepen our knowledge and brighten our lights; they recruit our seas and our stars. Of such flashes my new friend was as innocent as the sternest matter-of-fact person could desire. Fancies he had in profusion, and very bad ones; but of imagination not a scintilla! His mind was one of those which live in a prison of logic, and cannot, or will not, see beyond the bars.
Pisistratus Caxton in Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton’s The Caxtons: A Family Picture
See also: Imagination TG 62; Imagination, Improvisation TG 102
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