You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is an outcome of a conference held in Salado, Texas, where Dr Harry Wilmer directs the Institute of Humanities. Over the years he has organized several major conferences on subjects such as ‘Evil’, ‘Closeness’, and this one on ‘Creativity’. He has attracted the most prominent people in their fields to this small town in Texas where participants engage in spirited dialogue. There is electricity in the air as the guests and speakers gather for a weekend of intense discussion.
The book is divided into two parts. The first half, entitled ‘Paradoxes’, presents role-orientated perceptions from inside out. That is to say, creative people speak about their own creative works. The speakers include Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish novelist, Jacques Barzurn, famous academician in the arts, Naomi Nye, a poet, the actor Lee Marvin, and Linus Pauling, twice Nobel laureate. Linus Pauling also wrote the introduction to the overall endeavour.
World renowned creative people talking about how the creative process works in themselves always present a difficulty for me. The difficulty is that any description of creativity seems to me to fail to capture the essence of the process. Linus Pauling has always been of particular interest, because he spoke at our college thirty-six years ago when I was an undergraduate student. He spoke informally about how he discovered the structure of the haemoglobin molecule. He had been giving lectures at Cambridge University when he developed a bad cold which kept him in bed for several days. As he lay there, unable to give his lectures, he began playing with the structure of haemoglobin. He pulled out two long key chains and began to experiment with them. It suddenly occurred to him that, theoretically, the structure of the haemoglobin molecule should be two long strands of amino acids connected in a certain way. Afterwards, he was able to check out his intuitions. In this unexpected way he discovered the structure of haemoglobin. I always remembe