Tending the Landscapes of Our Imaginations

I ’ve been thinking a good deal lately about imagination — specifically, the imaginative space in our minds, and its importance in the second half of our lives.

A good deal of the work of our brains — emphasis on work — consists of the here and now. We perceive, we interact, we analyze, we plan by reason and experience and proceed according to those plans. But the imaginative space deals in the places we haven’t gone yet, and in many cases never will. It is filled both with unreal things and things we wish, or fear, will be real. It is the place we explore or retreat to inside of us when we are alone, or at rest, or bored, or in other ways not immediately stimulated or occupied. It is where we think about the future in ways that may engage our puzzle-solving sides, but can also run well beyond the purely rational — constructing our best and worst-case scenarios, wishcasting, and at times, taking us down the future of our pasts — the rest of roads not traveled. Some people have more active imaginations than others, but the furnishings and population of our imaginative spaces is, for all of us, an underrated component of our happiness or lack thereof.

We tend to associate imagination with childhood, and for good reasons. Small children, having a limited store of knowledge, few responsibilities, and typically a small circle of people they know, naturally range widely in and out of their imaginative spaces. Their imaginations start out untutored, which both encourages creativity and limits its vocabulary, and gain more form as they learn stories and take in more of the world.

But the places we go inside of us don’t stop mattering when we leave kindergarten. They expand to take in all manner of our interests and ambitions. In different seasons of life, they are furnished with career aspirations, material ambitions, romantic crushes, and sexual fantasies. Sports fans dream and daydream of how their favorite teams or players could go from success to success. Books, television shows, comic books, and even advanced computer games or role-playing games that succeed in taking hold of our imaginations allow us to spend time in their constructed worlds and, until we get to the end, picture where their stories and characters may lead. The politically minded can envision electoral victories and policy plans. Gambling runs on imagination.

For people of a certain spiritual or mystical bent, the imaginative space can be where they encounter God. I confess that I have never had that blessing; I have to work at prayer, rather than experiencing it as something that comes unbidden.

The thing about imagination is: It doesn’t stop when you are a mature adult with responsibilities, or even in old age. This has a couple of implications. One is that you should be filling your imagination with more than one thing. Consider it like a diet or an investment portfolio: Diversify what you feed it so it doesn’t dwell obsessively upon a single thing. Most of what we give our imaginations to run with are things outside of our control, so you never really know at any given time which of them may go badly in a hurry. Always in motion the future is, as Yoda said. The hysteria of our politics today is accentuated by people who have fed nothing but politics to their imaginations and have nowhere else to retreat when it goes through the rough patches that are cyclical in a two-party democratic system.

There are plenty of other ways that having too few things for our imaginations to dwell upon can be unhealthy. Sometimes, it’s a thing as simple as a book or favorite TV show ending. Sometimes, it’s your favorite team collapsing in agonizing ways. These are always painful, but they are much more painful if there’s nothing else running through your head at night. To state the obvious, even as we age and our futures offer fewer possibilities, people traditionally have invested their hopes and dreamscapes in the next generation, and eventually the next one after that. The more descendants you have, the more possibilities that offers to your sanity.

A share of escapism can be a necessary outlet. I do not read much fiction anymore, given how much else I am constantly reading. During the 2016 election cycle, however, I gave my brain something else to work on by reading through Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant Chronicles (two late-’70s/early-’80s trilogies and a late-2000s/early-2010s four-book concluding sequence). There’s a lot to chew on in Donaldson’s vividly imagined fantasy world of cynical unbelief, numbness and feeling, guilt, pain, memory, madness, healing laughter, missions, destiny, gnomic divine interventions, and betrayals by the perversion of nature itself. It didn’t take me out of continuing to read, write, and argue about politics, but it fit the mood of the year while opening new imaginative doors in my head. For many people, literature high or low serves this purpose, and it behooves us to return to it when other sources of imagination run in short supply or beckon down dark and despairing corridors. Escapism doesn’t, or shouldn’t, remove us from the hard realities of the world, but some time away can fortify us to face it.

More recently, I confess that a lot of my imagination has been given over to writing a history book. History may not seem like much of an imaginative topic, and it’s not in the sense of collecting facts and retelling stories, except to the extent that one needs a certain amount of imagination to picture how things went down when you weren’t there. But the planning of the book itself is a work of imagination. And so is history in two other ways. One is placing yourself back into the imaginative spaces of the people whose decisions you are analyzing: asking on the basis of the evidence what paths seemed open to them, and where they thought they might lead, and why. The other aspect is the never-ending call of the roads not taken and the futures that never were. Tragedy invites us to reflect on how it might have been avoided. William Faulkner famously captured this sense in his 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust, on his Southern characters replaying endlessly the disaster for the Confederacy of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances . . . that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time. . . .

Lonely people with too little else to imagine are an increasing share of the population from late middle age into the elder years. That can be how older folks get themselves consumed by worry. Worry in the aged is nature’s way of your body telling you to be more cautious with an increasingly breakable instrument, and it is also the fruit of experience in quite how many ways things can go wrong in life. But if we give ourselves too little else to imagine, worry — and its companion, despair — can swallow us whole. Against that, we should guard as long as we can by feeding our minds a varied diet and rotating the crops of our imaginative landscapes.