Why You Must Become a Creator
Consuming too much is destroying you
The Culturist
We are the most entertained people in history, but might we be the least creative?
Nowadays, it is frighteningly easy to spend the best part of a day consuming the creations of others: listening, streaming, scrolling. For most of us, the ratio of consumption to creation has never been more lopsided — and yet, the tools of creation are more accessible than ever.
Let us establish at the outset that consuming art is itself a worthy pursuit. But if this is all you do, what are you giving up?
G.K. Chesterton once wrote that a culture has become decadent when its people prefer to pay others to dance for them, rather than a whole room of people doing the dancing for themselves.
This matters because creation is not just a joyful addition to human life, but the defining feature of it. This is an argument made by several great writers, from Ruskin to Chesterton to Tolkien: that created beings are designed to create things themselves.
This article examines why — and importantly how — we must all pick up a pen or a brush, and bring into the world something of our own…
Dorothy L. Sayers, an Oxford contemporary of J.R.R. Tolkien (and honorary Inkling in my view), made this compelling argument in her book, The Mind of the Maker. In it, she argues why the desire to create is an integral part of the human experience.
"When we turn back to see what [the author of Genesis] says about the original upon which the ‘image’ of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, ‘God created’. The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things."
It is through the process of imaginative creation that a human being in some sense emulates the God of Genesis: creating something out of nothing.
"It is the artist who, more than other men, is able to create something out of nothing. A whole artistic work is immeasurably more than the sum of its parts." ...
This matters because creation is not just a joyful addition to human life, but the defining feature of it. This is an argument made by several great writers, from Ruskin to Chesterton to Tolkien: that created beings are designed to create things themselves.
This article examines why — and importantly how — we must all pick up a pen or a brush, and bring into the world something of our own…
Dorothy L. Sayers, an Oxford contemporary of J.R.R. Tolkien (and honorary Inkling in my view), made this compelling argument in her book, The Mind of the Maker. In it, she argues why the desire to create is an integral part of the human experience.
"When we turn back to see what [the author of Genesis] says about the original upon which the ‘image’ of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, ‘God created’. The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things."
It is through the process of imaginative creation that a human being in some sense emulates the God of Genesis: creating something out of nothing.
"It is the artist who, more than other men, is able to create something out of nothing. A whole artistic work is immeasurably more than the sum of its parts." ...
