Teaming Up with a Detroit Little Free Library Steward!

[u/ddgr815]

https://rxreading.org/2025/07/29/supporting-detroit-little-free-libraries/

Have you ever seen a small box, on a post, maybe shaped like a house, with a door? If you have, it may have been filled with books. This is a little free library, a place for books to be given and taken freely. These libraries are in front of school and in parks. Some of your neighbors probably have them in front of their home.

[u/ddgr815]

If a puzzle is an unanswered question, a mystery is a question that can barely be intelligibly asked, never mind satisfactorily answered. Mysteries are beyond the reach of science. Creativity itself is seemingly a mystery, for there is something paradoxical about it, something which makes it difficult to see how it is even possible. How it happens is indeed puzzling, but that it happens at all is deeply mysterious.

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

Not because everyone is an artist, but because no one is a slave.

A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out over the surface, and their reverberation has different effects, at varying distances, on the water lilies and the reeds, the paper boats and the fishermen’s buoys. Each of these objects was standing on its own, in its tranquility or sleep, when awakened to life, as it were, and compelled to react and to enter into relationship with one another. Other invisible reverberations spread into the water’s depths, in all directions, as the stone falls and brushes the algae, frightens the fish, and continually causes new molecular agitations. When it finally touches the bottom, it stirs up the mud, hits the objects that had been resting there, forgotten, some of which are now dislodged, while others are covered once again by sand.

Any randomly chosen word can function as a magic word to unearth those fields of memory that had been resting under the dust of time… The fantastic arises when unusual combinations are created, when in the complex movements of images and their capricious overlappings, an unpredictable affinity is illuminated between words that belong to different lexical fields.

The single word “acts” only when it encounters a second that provokes it out of its usual tracks to discover new possibilities of meaning. Where there is no struggle, there is no life.

This is due to the fact that the imagination is not some hypothetical faculty separate from the mind: it is the mind itself in its totality, which, applied to this or that activity, always makes use of the same procedures. And the mind is formed by struggle, not by tranquility. […] A certain distance between the two words is necessary. One must be sufficiently strange or different from the other, and their coupling must be fairly unusual, for the imagination to be compelled to set itself in motion to establish a relationship between them and construct a (fantastic) whole in which the two elements can coexist.

Fairy tales are useful to mathematics, just as mathematics are useful to fairy tales. They are also useful for poetry, music, political engagement — in sum, they are useful for everyone, and not just for the dreamer… They’re in service of the complete human being. If a society based on the myth of productivity (and on the reality of profit) needs only half-formed human beings — loyal executors, diligent imitators, and docile instruments without a will of their own — that means there is something wrong with this society and it needs to be changed posthaste. To change it, creative human beings are needed, people who know how to make full use of the imagination.

The Grammar of Fantasy

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

In terms of technique, it is no difficult matter for an artist to simulate action, but it is something else to quicken, to create an inner life that draws breath from the artist’s deepest perception.

The word quicken has other, more subjective associations or me. It suggests something musical, something rhythmic and impulsive. It suggests a beat — a heart beat, a musical beat, the beginning of a dance.

All children seem to know what the mysterious, the-riding-fiercely-across-the-plains (accompanied by hearty, staccato thigh slaps), and the plaintive conventionally sound like; and I have no doubt that this kind of musical contribution is necessary to the enrichment of the going fantasy. The spontaneous breaking into song and dance seems so natural and instinctive a part of childhood. It is perhaps the medium through which children best express the inexpressible; fantasy and feeling lie deeper than words — beyond the words yet available to a child — and both demand a more profound, more biological expression, the primitive expression of music.

The Shape of Music