On Saturday 10 April 2004 12:05 am, Edward K. Ream wrote: > > Why do uncreative people live at all? > > Why ask why? It's their problem :-)
I disagree: we, the uncreative, provide most of the indispensable support and follow-through for most creative people's "sparks". In a well-known quote, Thomas Alva Edison defines genius as 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration (this is widely mis-attributed to Albert Einstein and other well-known quipsters;-). I would roughly agree -- and add that very few of the creative people, those lucky enough to be blessed with that 1% of inspiration, have the stomach and the taste for the long, careful, systematic, painstaking, often-boring and always-tiring work, implied by that 99% of perspiration. Fortunately, ideas are irresistibly infective, even though all patent lawyers, copyright-term extenders, and other purveyors of "intellectual property" drivel, would stem the tide. More often than not, large, indispensable swathes of that 99% of perspiration are provided by US, the uncreative, laboring patiently at crack-filling, t-crossing, i-dotting, and sundry other unglamorous tasks -- without such follow-up, all the creative sparks in the world would leave us all still cowering in damp caves, you know... (admittedly, so would all the patient toil in the world _without_ the occasional spark coming from the creative ones -- my point is that both sorts are needed to make real progress). As a healthy antidote to the hubris that often seems to accompany creativity, I would recommend periodical doses of "Forrest Gump", or, for something completely different, Agnes Jaoui's sublime "Le Gout des Autres", Jasmin Dizdar's superb "Beautiful People", Alain Resnais's classic "Mon Oncle d'Amerique"... each of these artists manages, in different ways, to show how complicated and intertwined is the world of humans, how each instrument in the orchestra happens to play the right notes at the right time so that the full symphony can in the end emerge. Alex _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/pypy-dev
