A Corner for Creativity

Why creativity requires freedom... and leisure!

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Not even three chapters into Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture, an idea for my third- but this time short- post dawned on me. Note that my mind was primed to receive Pieper’s words of wisdom, my body and soul relaxed.

I’ll give the first words to Pieper:

The mode of discursive thought is accompanied and impregnated by an effortless awareness, the contemplative vision of the “intellectus,” which is not active but passive, or rather receptive, the activity of the soul in which it conceives that which it sees (28).

Man participates [using his discursive faculty- my comment] in the angelic faculty of non-discursive vision, which is the capacity to apprehend the spiritual in the same manner that our eye apprehends light or our ear sound (29).

Finally,

Just as the highest form of virtue knows nothing of “difficulty,” so too the highest form of knowledge comes to man like a gift- the sudden illumination, a stroke of genius, true contemplation; it comes effortlessly and without trouble (34).

Moments of epiphany, or, as Bishop Barron might put it, moments of “transfiguration,” occur in a similar fashion: we are going about our business when we are unexpectedly met with heralds of a reality that assuredly lies beyond us, beyond the limits of space and time. Lewis, to whose words Bishop Barron refers in the homily in question (“When the Eternal Breaks Through”; he alludes to Surprised by Joy, which is high on my Goodreads list), writes of these experiences in a shorter but no less familiar work entitled “The Weight of Glory.” In that essay, Lewis humbly remarks that “in speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you- the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness” and so on (page 3 of a PDF version of the essay). Moments of inspiration and “sudden illuminations” also fit the bill. While such sensations come and go with striking rapidity, we still owe them our attention when we do enjoy them. What does this look like?

Say you’re writing a book or article. You may dream of finding success and accomplishing great things in the future, but these cannot be your primary motives; in fact, if they are, they may impede your progress. Why?

If you pursue fame and glory and crave the thrills of a challenge, you cannot enter into the act of writing for its own sake and on its own merits. The analogy I am going to make may seem dramatic, but I hope it will shed light on my argument. Andrei Bolkonsky of War and Peace, which I am currently reading and studying with a friend (for its own sake, not for a class), to put it briefly (but it’s War and Peace, Ava… yes, I know), is a man driven by his pursuit of glory, honor, and fame. If he could only raise the Russian standard in the Napoleonic Wars and be the next Napoleon for Russia, he thinks, he could taste true happiness. In these moments of delusion, he does not consider his family back home and everything he has left behind. Andrei is ultimately injured and sent home, but not before he realizes what is truly important. Lying barely conscious on the ground, he gazes at the sky above him, reflecting on its brilliance and immensity (Tolstoy’s metaphor for the divine) and the futility of his aims. In fact, he no longer regards Napoleon as majestic, even when Napoleon deigns to visit him and his fellow wounded soldiers in a tent. Without going into the details, Andrei’s return to his family’s home, where he is able to rest and reflect, marks the beginning of a transition period in his life. If Andrei had played a major role in a victorious or losing battle, his outlook might have remained too narrow, and he may have continued to indulge his illusions of grandeur.

Similarly, if we solely lean into each challenge, whether it is writing-related or not, without considering where it is leading us- I often felt I was doing this at school, inundated with term papers and unable to truly enjoy the topics and the wisdom I was gaining until after the fact-, we will not experience the amount of growth we should. On a theological note (courtesy of Pieper), “the Christian conception of sacrifice is not concerned with the suffering involved qua suffering, it is not primarily concerned with the toil and the worry and with the difficulty, but with salvation, with the fullness of being, and thus ultimately with the fullness of happiness” (35). Ours ought not be a postmodern endeavor where all meaning is invented and creativity is forced. The writing of an essay or story demands freedom and space for contemplation. Our human journey likewise involves conforming our minds and souls to the truth we dimly ascertain beyond the borders of the known world even as we actively live out our vocations. We know the moral of the story. Let’s do our part to add to it… and, with God’s help, make it excellent!