STUDENT ESSAY
swords against an enemy that is not of our imagination. We must be strong. For we are called to be more than conquerors. This is the vision of a child when he imagines a dragon or an enemy twice as large as himself. His sword may be plastic and His dragon in his mind, but his vision is courage—“ be strong.” His fight may be a lie in that it is not“ real,” but truth runs through the unreality: we are called to be conquerors. In this way, as Chesterton said,“ Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” 4
Imagination, therefore, is not just an idea in the mind. It is an ideal. It is the pursuit of something beyond ourselves. We are called to have ideals( the child should imagine a house from a table), but here we must make a distinction. For, although we are called to have ideals, we aren’ t called to live in our ideals. Ideals are meant to be lived out, not lived in. Just as a child is not meant to live in a“ table-house” forever, but is supposed to grow up and get a real house, so it is with our imagination. For, imagination is a vision, and that vision, if it is good, should become reality. 5 This is why
Imagination, therefore, is not just an idea in the mind. It is an ideal. It is the pursuit of something beyond ourselves.
it is said that we must nurture a child’ s imagination, just as we would nurture and encourage their curiosity, their visions, their hopes, their dreams. As was said in lecture,“ after all, it was the tyrant Napoleon who hauntingly declared,‘ Imagination rules the world’... Where there is no real moral imagination, itself a form of vision, the people will become captives of corrupt and corrupting forms of imagination, for while imagination as such may be an innate human capacity, it needs proper nurture and cultivation.” 6
The story of Don Quixote is an example of someone living in their ideal— their“ made up” world. And again, as it was touched on before, madness is a theme. Everyone thinks Don Quixote is mad. But is he? Is he messed up in his view of the world? Or does his vision of the world declare some truth or ideal that should be strived and fought for? Don Quixote lives in his imagination; his world is one in which windmills are giants and prostitutes are high born and noble ladies. So he fights the windmills and honours the prostitutes. But there is truth to his madness, and profundity to the nonsense: for giants are to be fought and prostitutes are made to be noble. At the same time, there seems to be a problem with Don Quixote. His problem, though, is not that he imagines himself to be a Knight, nor is it that he desires to be a knight. To be a knight is a noble thing( as, I believe, Cervantes wants to put forward in his story). Don Quixote is revealing something that the modern world has forgotten or missed: that we are all knights of the highest king, the King of Kings, called to chivalry and nobility. This is our ideal, our aim, our goal. This is what we are called to. It is what we are. The chivalric code is anything but ridiculous. However, Don Quixote makes it so because he doesn’ t understand that one can have an ideal, but unless you make the ideal reality it is but an idea in the mind, unborn and unrealized. But, some might say, Don Quixote is a knight. After all, he acquires the
4 G. K. Chesterton. Tremendous Trifles.( London: Methuen, 1909), 102.
5 It is important to note that there are ways in which one can make one’ s ideal or vision reality that is not seeing the world correctly, or rightly.
6 Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things: The Moral Imagination in Politics, Literature, and Everyday Life( Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, © 2005), 49-50.
16 THE COMMONS