Bibliopath #13: In which we talk about Ursula just one more time
Dear reader,
I'm pivoting this newsletter slightly to talk about a sentence I liked this week, and hoping to email a bit more frequently. With that in mind, a sentence I've been thinking about (thanks to my friend Sarah):
I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.
I love the sentence because of the dual meaning: the idea that the imagination is a truer, more useful tool than these appendages that separate us from the apes. But also the kicker: the imagination is what makes it possible to even conceive the possibility of being without thumbs in the first place.
It comes from Ursula K Le Guin (last one for a while, I promise), in the midst of an impassioned defence of the imagination:
I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination ... Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.
(See here at Brain Pickings for the fuller quote.)
It reminds of a phrase that's been lounging in my head since I heard in it an On Being episode with Rebecca Solnit: "the tyranny of the quantifiable". That is, the way that what we can measure overrules our decision making towards more of what can be measured. You see it in 'success' stories all the time. X makes a lot of quantifiable money selling foot spas, or human attention, or private data. Media interviews X to see how exactly they did it. A lot of people consume that media to see how they can make quantifiable stacks. Mostly, they fail—because of reasons, unquantifiable.
The imagination however, as Le Guin points out is unquantifiable. Because of this, there will, perhaps forever, be an underlying resentment towards literature and the arts—the incubators of imagination—usually codified into the idea that these things 'do not matter' as much as that which can be measured. You can track sales, sure. But it is difficult, as yet, for machines to track the expansion of the soul upon reading a great novel.
Back to that longer quote. The kicker is those last two words—"remaining human". For if we are not building our own imagination, and our collective imagination—the social imaginary, as Charles Taylor puts it—then we will forever retreat into what we already know, what we can measure.
And I'd rather imagine living without my thumbs.
And you, what have you been reading? And what sentences have you liked?
Guan