'I Successfully Pretend I Am a Human Being'

A longtime reader is convinced we are enduring an imagination deficit. “Everywhere,” she writes, “I see clichés taking over. Obviously in public life with politicians and journalists. That’s nothing new but in the arts too, music and writing. It’s as though AI created them.” No argument here, though I’m skeptical of "monocausal explanations," as the boys down at the bowling alley say. “When I was a little girl,” she adds, “I learned that imagination was healthy, a faculty to be encouraged in children.” She reminds me of remarks the novelist Thomas Berger (1924-2014) made in an interview collected in Critical Essays on Thomas Berger (ed. David Madden, 1995): 

“As a child I always loved to read and exercise my imagination. I have a vague memory of wanting to grow up to be a foreign correspondent, but that had to do almost entirely with wearing a trench coat, and I think that before I got too old I understood the difference between journalism and fiction and came to prefer the latter as being more likely to serve the truth: I mean, of course, using Pascal’s distinction, the truth of the heart and not of the reason, which is to say the serious truth as opposed to that of expedience and vulgarity.”

 

Imagination promotes truth, yes, but on a humbler, less morally elevated level it also makes people more interesting. Talking with a dullard or trying to read his words is a trial. The OED gives five definitions of imagination. One is negative: “the operation of fanciful, erroneous, or deluded thought.” In a word, lies, or at least delusions, and that meaning bleeds into common usage. Many are suspicious of imagination, as in “It’s all in your imagination.” The OED’s most appealing definition, the one I think my reader has in mind, is this: “The mind’s creativity and resourcefulness in using and inventing images, analogies, etc.; poetic or artistic genius or talent.” I would broaden that a little to include the sciences, engineering and even everyday amateur problem solving. A non-electrician who can tinker and find a way to repair a toaster is flexing his imagination. As Nabokov puts it, “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” In evolutionary terms, imagination has its adaptive advantages. Berger, one of the finest American novelists, completes his thought:

 

“I regard myself as a teller of tales that are intended primarily to enchant or at least entertain myself. Only by living in the imagination can I successfully pretend I am a human being.”