Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of creating a world that nurtures creativity and sensitivity.
Rebecca Solnit's quote captures the idea of a revolution that prioritizes the delicate and often overlooked aspects of life, such as poetry and vulnerability. It advocates for a society where the arts and the seemingly impractical are valued and protected, suggesting that a truly humane world is one that embraces the fragile, rare, and local elements that contribute to our humanity.
In practice
In a creative writing workshop, I shared a quote by Rebecca Solnit to inspire participants to embrace their unique voices.
Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
It is true that all men are created in the image of God, but Christians are supposed to be conscious of that fact, and being conscious of it should recognize the importance of living artistically, aesthetically, and creatively, as creative creatures of the Creator. If we have been created in the image of an Artist, then we should look for expressions of artistry, and be sensitive to beauty, responsive to what has been created for us
...I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.
Limitations are something that I latch onto - like working in genre, or if you're writing TV, there are act breaks, there's a length of time it's supposed to be. The restrictions of budget and sets can be really useful. When you can have everything, it's very hard to make things feel real and lived in.
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Do people choose the art that inspires them β do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.