Howard

A priest who hears confessions is separated by a grillwork from the person making confession; he does not see him, he only hears. As he listens, he gradually forms a picture of the other’s outward appearance corresponding to what he hears; thus he finds no contradiction. It is different, however, when one sees and hears simultaneously but sees a grillwork between oneself and the speaker.

I picture to myself a young, energetic girl of genius having the extraordinary idea of wanting to avenge her sex on me. She thinks she will be able to coerce me, to make me taste the pains of unhappy love. That, you see, is a girl for me. If she herself does not think of it profoundly enough, I shall come to her assistance. I shall writhe like the Molbos’ eel.13 And when I have brought her to the point where I want her, then she is mine.”

4What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound [I 3] anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

And people crowd around the poet and say to him, “Sing again soon”—in other words, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before, because your screams would only alarm us, but the music is charming.

How unreasonable people are! They never use the freedoms they have but demand those they do not have; they have freedom of thought—they demand freedom of speech.

I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t feel like riding—the motion is too powerful; I don’t feel like walking—it is too tiring; I don’t feel like lying down, for either I would have to stay down, and I don’t feel like doing that, or I would have to get up again, and I don’t feel like doing that, either. Summa Summarum: I don’t feel like doing anything.

An intelligence is the ability to solve problems, or to create products, that are valued within one or more cultural settings—a definition that says nothing about either the sources of these abilities or the proper means of “testing” them.

There is a relation between intelligences and domains, but it is crucial not to confound these two realms. A person with musical intelligence is likely to be attracted to, and to be successful in, the domain of music. But the domain of musical performance requires intelligences beyond the musical (for example, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence and the personal intelligences), just as musical intelligence can be mobilized for domains beyond music in the strict sense (as in dance or in advertising).

The trio of intelligence, domain, and field has proved not only useful for unraveling a host of issues raised by MI theory, but also particularly fruitful for studies of creativity. As formulated originally by Csikszentmihalyi (1988), the felicitous question is: Where is creativity? The answer is that creativity should not be thought of as inhering principally in the brain, the mind, or the personality of a single individual. Rather, creativity should be thought of as emerging from the interactions of three nodes: the individual with his or her own profile of competences and values; the domains available for study and mastery within a culture; and the judgments rendered by the field that is deemed competent within a culture.

His life has been an attempt to accomplish the task of living poetically.