Albert Read
2023, The Imagination Muscle, Constable.
From the Introduction:
‘A wise person had once impressed on me the importance of reading what no one else is reading; of cultivating a rare mind; of forming perspectives individually arrived at, perhaps different from those of my peers. The purpose of such activity was to launch my own inner journeys; to land, if I was lucky, on original alignments of thought.
It sounded like a good idea at the time and I tried to follow the advice without quite knowing where it would take me. And so I would spend the evenings with one of the old books that I had picked up inexpensively. Reading partly released me from the numbness of a deflating, unimaginative working say, but it also held the more thrilling prospect of one of those promised inner journeys that could lead me to places of which I could not yet conceive, perhaps even revealing some first hint of an imagined destiny.’
