You can tell a lot about a man from the company he keeps, but also, added Hilaire Belloc, from the library he keeps. Naturally enough, I’m casting an eye around mine to see what kind of a man I might be. Principally a self-important one, if I consider these shelves a library at all, and, secondly, a distressingly illiterate one, as the shelves groan not with the virtuous and the edifying but, unfailingly, with unimaginative rubbish.
Given that I’m never going to write the sequel to In Search of Lost Time (word count: 1,267,069), this impacts me in a chiefly quotidian way. I lack imagination when it comes to, in no particular order, present giving, cookery, letter writing and walking the dogs (we always seem to follow the same well-worn route). I’m barely thinking inside the box, let alone out of it. I’m not flexing, in other words, my “imagination muscle”, a function of the mind that can be trained and developed. Not that I knew I had one to flex, train or develop, until I read Albert Read’s gripping The Imagination Muscle earlier this summer.
This is a book about art, about business, about science, and about big – very big – ideas. It’s also hugely improving, though it’s not a classic self-help book. Jargon-free and buzzword-less, it’s too well written for that, although the premise is deceptively simple. “It’s about ideas, how to have them, how to keep them, what to do with them – and then have more ideas,” explains Read of his bestselling volume, which is now available in paperback in the UK. “We look after our mental health; we look after our physical health; we consider our emotional wellbeing – but we don’t pay attention to our imaginative health. This book is saying: here are some ideas that can help you do it. We need to think of the imagination differently. It’s not something bestowed from above. It’s something within you.”
Read – who, until the end of last year, oversaw the emotional, physical and imaginative wellbeing of Condé Nast Europe’s stable of magazines as the company’s managing director – is well-equipped to enlighten us, coming from a long line of writers and thinkers. (His grandfather, Herbert Read, is one of the 20th century’s preeminent art historians, while his father, Piers Paul Read, is the author of numerous acclaimed works, including Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.) So how, exactly, does one address and refine one’s imaginative palette?
As ever, there are lessons to be gleaned from history, both ancient and recent, and Read gives us many entertaining and instructive examples. There are obvious ones (going for a long, contemplative walk was encouraged by the Romantic poets) and less obvious ones. Take the story of Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, who, in order to devote his life to his theorems, stripped away all unnecessary distractions. This included eating (he never buttered his own bread until he was 21, but found it relatively easy when forced to) and having somewhere to live, relying instead on the comfort of friends and strangers. “Another roof, another proof,” was his mantra.