Image Credit: Allison Gould
As we return from our winter hiatus with our first posts of the decade, this week The Junkyard gets into the retrospective spirit. We asked five friends of the blog – Peter Langland-Hassan, Margherita Arcangeli, Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, and Bence Nanay – to reflect on the previous decade and give us a “Top Five” list relating to imagination. There were no other requirements – we thought we’d give them free rein to come up with whatever they wanted, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s an interesting set of ruminations. We’ll be running one of these lists each day this week. Next week, we’ll resume our regular weekly postings.
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A post by Margherita Arcangeli.
The twenty-tens have seen a renewed attention to women's rights and gender equality.
Here is a top-five of quotes on imagination by women:
1) “I have too much imagination to be a housewife” (Marilyn Monroe)
2) “Never be limited by other people's limited imagination” (Mae Jemison)
3) “My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.” (Patricia Highsmith)
4) “Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored. (...). It is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistent; there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can’t be transformed into food for the imagination” (Patricia A. McKillip)
5) I watched a documentary on Rita Levi Montalcini and they stressed that she praised the role of the imagination (in her office she had Einstein's quote: "Imagination is more important than knowledge"), but I could only find quotes that she re-quoted (like Carl Sagan's quote: “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere”).
Here is a top-five of songs related to the imagination:
1) Pure imagination, my heart is attached to the original version by Gene Wilder, but remarkable covers have been done in the twenty-tens, for instance by Fiona Apple (2013) and by Diana Panton (2015).
2) Just my imagination, as a tribute to Dolores O’Riordan, who passed away in 2018.
3) The mind’s eye, by Max Richter (2018).
4) Wild imagination, by Kurt Vile (2015).
5) Le nostre anime, by Franco Battiato & Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra (2019). There is a beautiful passage: “Abbiamo attraversato una vita, piena di cambiamenti, abbiamo imparato a contemplare la natura e i desideri verso l'immaginazione. Le visioni arriveranno improvvise e impensabili. [We have gone through a life full of changes, we have learned to contemplate nature and desires towards the imagination. Visions will come unexpectedly and unimaginably.]”
Margherita Arcangeli is a post-doctoral researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Institut Jean Nicod. Her main areas of research are philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, aesthetics and epistemology.