Building castles
Just one quote this week. Once again picked from Maria Popova’s book Figuring. What struck me about this is how the concerns expressed by Higginson 175 years ago about the perception of art as lacking utility and value, remain unresolved today and are under renewed attack in the age of AI.
Early in his career as a Unitarian minister, Higginson had scribbled into his notebook the plan for a sermon entitled “The Dreamer & worker — the day & night of the soul” — a meditation on the relationship between profit and poetry in a materialistic society where the work of artists was in danger of being discarded as devoid of utility. He insisted that the dreamer and the worker are naturally symbiotic in each of us and that it would be a mistake for society to sacrifice the poetic at the altar of the practicable and the profitable. “Do not throw up your ideas, but realize them,” he wrote in his sermon notes. “The boy who never built a castle in the air will never build one on earth.”