Tag: Imagination
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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September 4, 2026
Thanks to Barbara Drobot, a 2026 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
For years, I believed I was teaching people how to draw. I assumed the greatest challenges were technical: controlling the hand, understanding proportion, mastering perspective, or measuring relationships accurately. Those skills matter. But after more than a decade of teaching, I realized they were not what held most people back.
The real challenge was learning how to see.
» Read more about: What Drawing Reveals About the Way We Think »
May 31, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Last week, I mentioned that George Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, contained fairy tale elements. Today, I want to explore some of those impressions a little bit more.
First of all, the novel’s young couple meet in private in a seemingly magical, secluded wood. The narrator even mentions that it is just the right place for nymphs and fairies.
April 12, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Seeing that April is National Poetry Month, and poetry is one of my lifelong loves, I wanted to spend a few moments to share my experience. From songs and music, to rhyme and meter, I love it all. But people often ask me what I get out of poetry, what it does for me. So, today’s blog is a little nod to a discipline and art form that I have wrestled with for years.
February 17, 2023
Thanks to James Robertson, HMU student, for today’s blog.
In a poem, Whitman writes “This is no book; who touches this touches a man” (Leaves of Grass). In contrast, Plato has Socrates observe that “writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence” (Phaedrus).
October 28, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Fortunately for us, David Hume wrote a lot of his thoughts down in his book A Treatise on Human Nature. Yet it might not have been so. At the end of Book I, Hume admits, in lengthy detail, that he doubts himself, his work and his ideas. I find this reassuring for the rest of us who question our ideas as well.
June 10, 2022
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.” – John Baker, The Peregrine
”Learning is a profession….” – Zena Hitz
2022 Fellow in Ideas David Yamada recently wrote a book review that inspired me. Per his suggestion, I quickly read Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.
June 4, 2021
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Summer provides an excellent time to write. If any of you (or your students) tire of standard five paragraph essays and thesis statements (as I do), then use the summer to free yourself of these restrictions. Today’s blog suggests a couple of ways to sharpen your writing skills and hopefully avoid boredom.
First, examine another author’s definitions.
June 28, 2019
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Letters often hold interest for me as a researcher and reader. They demonstrate humanity in ways that other writing cannot. People allow themselves a level of intimacy on paper that is not allowed in other areas of life. I love to write letters and I do lament that they are not as popular now as they once were. This is one of the reasons that I became interested in a collection of letters titled Velocity of Being,
March 1, 2019
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
I never needed a reason to love the world, I simply just always have. With its faults and near-misses, its greed and its hope. I love the way it is patched together like a great quilt of countries and languages, mountains and deserts. Most of all, I love, and am humbled by the fact that somehow I participate in that great,
November 16, 2018
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
In Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin has her protagonist, Genly Ai, travel to the distant planet Gethen which has no birds or flying insects. As a result, the communities there never even thought to attempt flight and their language has no word for flying. It is no wonder, then, that the people mistrust Genly who arrives by airship.