Acclaim for
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN’S
THE
CREATORS
“Impressive … Boorstin has a magisterial gift.”
—Time
“Lucid and often entertaining … Boorstin brings us into the presence of his subjects. With his sensitivity to their memorable words and deeds, he takes his readers to the source of their creativity.”
—Seattle Times/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Mr. Boorstin is inviting and provocative.… The scope of this work is as broad as history itself, leading, with some beguiling detours, to the modern era … a book that distills the best of human achievement into human terms.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Magisterial … Boorstin imposes stylistic order on his massive chosen subject.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“The Creators is compelling history.… Boorstin’s is a clear and unpretentious prose and he has an eye for the amusing touch.”
—Birmingham Post-Herald
“The good things in this book are legion.… [It] throws startling light upon the odd byways of the creative adventure.… This genial, sensible, incredibly knowledgeable and invariably welcome historian has so much to give. He’s created another winner.”
—Washington Times
“The Creators is a feast of knowledge, a veritable smorgasbord of ideas, individuals and human accomplishments.… The Creators is a masterful work. It is one of the few surveys of human culture that itself is a work of art.”
—Wichita Eagle
BOOKS BY DANIEL J. BOORSTIN
The Discoverers
*
The Creators
*
The Seekers
*
The Americans: The Colonial Experience
The Americans: The National Experience
The Americans: The Democratic Experience
*
The Mysterious Science of the Law
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson
The Genius of American Politics
America and the Image of Europe
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
The Decline of Radicalism
The Sociology of the Absurd
Democracy and Its Discontents
The Republic of Technology
The Exploring Spirit
The Republic of Letters
Hidden History
Cleopatra’s Nose
The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader
The Landmark History of the American People (with Ruth F. Boorstin)
A History of the United States (with Brooks M. Kelley)
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1993
Copyright © 1992 by Daniel J. Boorstin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1992.
Owing to limitations of space, permission credits to reprint previously published material can be found starting on this page.
The photographs on this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page are from the Bettmann Archive and the photograph on this page is from the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boorstin, Daniel J. (Daniel Joseph), 1914–
The creators: a history of heroes of the imagination / Daniel J.
Boorstin.—1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Random House, c1992.
Companion volume to: The discoverers. 1983.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81721-1
1. Civilization—History. 2. Arts—History. 3. Creation.
I. Title.
[CB69.B65 1993]
909—dc20 93-15502
v3.1
FOR RUTH
To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past, perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.
—PABLO PICASSO (1923)
In art, we are the first to be heirs of all the earth.… Accidents impair and Time transforms, but it is we who choose.
—ANDRÉ MALRAUX (1950)
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
A Personal Note to the Reader
THE RIDDLE OF CREATION: A PROLOGUE
PART I: WORLDS WITHOUT BEGINNING
1. The Dazzled Vision of the Hindus
2. The Indifference of Confucius
3. The Silence of the Buddha
4. The Homeric Scriptures of the Greeks
PART II: A CREATOR-GOD
5. The Intimate God of Moses
6. The Birth of Theology
7. The Innovative God of Saint Augustine
8. The Uncreated Koran
BOOK ONE: CREATOR MAN
PART III: THE POWER OF STONE
9. The Mystery of Megaliths
10. Castles of Eternity
11. Temples of Community
12. Orders for Survival
13. Artificial Stone: A Roman Revolution
14. Dome of the World
15. The Great Church
16. A Road Not Taken: The Japanese Triumph of Wood
PART IV: THE MAGIC OF IMAGES
17. The Awe of Images
18. Human Hieroglyphs
19. The Athletic Ideal
20. For Family, Empire—and History
21. The Healing Image
22. “Satan’s Handiwork”
PART V: THE IMMORTAL WORD
23. Dionysus the Twice-Born
24. The Birth of the Spectator: From Ritual to Drama
25. The Mirror of Comedy
26. The Arts of Prose and Persuasion
BOOK TWO: RE-CREATING THE WORLD
PART VI: OTHERWORLDLY ELEMENTS
27. The Consoling Past
28. The Music of the Word
29. An Architecture of Light
30. Adventures in Death
PART VII: THE HUMAN COMEDY: A COMPOSITE WORK
31. Escaping the Plague
32. Joys of Pilgrimage
33. “In the Land of Booze and Bibbers”
34. Adventures in Madness
35. The Spectator Reborn
36. The Freedom to Choose
37. Sagas of Ancient Empire
38. New-World Epics
39. A Mosaic of Novels
40. In Love with the Public
PART VIII: FROM CRAFTSMAN TO ARTIST
41. Archetypes Brought to Life
42. Roman Afterlives
43. The Mysteries of Light: From a Walk to a Window
44. Sovereign of the Visible World
45. “Divine Michelangelo”
46. The Painted Word: The Inward Path of Tao
PART IX: COMPOSING FOR THE COMMUNITY
47. A Protestant Music
48. The Music of Instruments: From Court to Concert
49. New Worlds for the Orchestra
50. The Music of Risorgimento
51. A Germanic Union of the Arts
52. The Ephemeral Art of the Dance
53. The Music of Innovation
> PART X: CONJURING WITH TIME AND SPACE
54. The Painted Moment
55. The Power of Light: “The Pencil of Nature”
56. The Rise of the Skyscraper
BOOK THREE: CREATING THE SELF
PART XI: THE VANGUARD WORD
57. Inventing the Essay
58. The Art of Being Truthful: Confessions
59. The Arts of Seeming Truthful: Autobiography
60. Intimate Biography
61. The Heroic Self
62. Songs of the Self
63. In a Dry Season
PART XII: THE WILDERNESS WITHIN
64. An American at Sea
65. Sagas of the Russian Soul
66. Journey to the Interior
67. The Garden of Involuntary Memory
68. The Filigreed Self
69. “I Too Am Here!”
70. Vistas from a Restless Self
Epilogue: Mysteries of a Public Art
Some Reference Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Personal Note to the Reader
AFTER The Discoverers, a tale of man’s search to know the world and himself, I was more than ever convinced that the pursuit of knowledge is only one path to human fulfillment. This companion book, also a view from the literate West, is a saga of Heroes of the Imagination. While The Discoverers told of the conquest of illusions—the illusions of knowledge—this will be a story of visions (and illusions) newly created. For this is a story of how creators in all the arts have enlarged, embellished, fantasized, and filigreed our experience. While ancient science has only a historical interest, and Galen and Ptolemy live only for the scholar, the ancient arts are living treasures for all of us.
These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story—a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination. Here I have chosen creators who appeal to me, who have brought something new into the arts. But each of us alone must experience how the new adds to the old and how the old enriches the new, how Picasso enhances Leonardo and how Homer illuminates Joyce.
PROLOGUE
THE
RIDDLE
OF
CREATION
It has been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect that he can dispense with a creator.
—MARCEL PROUST (1921)
PART ONE
WORLDS
WITHOUT
BEGINNING
If God created the world, where was he before creation?… How could God have made the world without any raw material?…
If he is ever perfect and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him?
—JAIN SACRED TEXT (NINTH CENTURY)
1
The Dazzled Vision of the Hindus
THE Hindus have left an eloquent history of their efforts to answer the riddle of Creation. The Vedas, sacred hymns in archaic Sanskrit from about 1500 to 900 B.C., do not depict a benevolent Creator, but record a man’s awe before the Creation as singers of the Vedas chant the radiance of this world. Their objects of worship were devas (cognate with Latin deus, god) derived from the old Sanskrit div, meaning brightness. Gods were the shining ones. The luminosity of their world impressed the Hindus from the beginning. Not the fitting-together-ness, not the hierarchy of beings or the order of nature, but the blinding splendor, the Light of the World. How the world once came into being or how it might end seemed irrelevant before the brightness of the visible world.
The Vedic hymns leave us a geology of names and myths and legends, untroubled by the mysteries of origin and destiny. Over all shines a radiant fire illuminating the Hindu vision. The fire-god was everywhere—how many was he? Sacrificial fire was a messenger carrying the consumed oblation upward to the gods. Benares, the pilgrim’s destination, was the City of Light. The god Agni (meaning fire, related to Latin ignis) was said to be “the priest of the gods and the god of the priests.” In the heavens he was the sun, in the atmosphere he was lightning, and on earth fire.
O Agni, illuminator of darkness, day by day we approach you with holy thought bringing homage to you.
Presiding at ritual functions, the brightly shining custodian of the cosmic order.…
The god who makes fire and light makes all seeing possible. What sanctifies the worshiper is no act of conversion, no change of spirit, but the simple act of seeing, the Hindi word darśan. A Hindu goes to a temple not to “worship,” but rather “for darśan,” to see the image of the deity. Each of the cities sacred to each of the thousands of gods offers its own special darśan : Benares (Varanasi) for the darśan of Lord Visvanath, the high Himalayas for the darśan of Vishnu, or a nearby hilltop for the darśan of a local god. In the life of the sacred city of Benares the quest for seeing embodies much that is distinctive to the religions of Hindus. The Hindu is dazzled by a vision of the holy, not merely holy people but places like the Himalayan peaks where the gods live, or the Ganges which flows from Heaven to Earth, or countless inconspicuous sites where gods or goddesses or unsung heroes showed their divine mettle. The Hindu pilgrims trek hundreds of miles just for another darśan.
So too the people of India attach a special value to the sight, the darśan, of a saintly person or a great leader. When Mahatma Gandhi crossed India by train, thousands collected along the tracks, gathering at his stopping places for an instant’s glimpse of the Mahatma through a train window. They were “taking his darśan.” According to the Hindus, the deity or a holy spirit or place or image “gives darśan” and the people “take darśan,” for which there seems no counterpart in any Western religion.
Darśan is a two-way flow of vision. While the devotee sees the god, so too the god sees the devotee, and the two make contact through their eyes. In building a new temple, even before images of the gods are made, the gods are beseeched to turn a kindly eye on all who come to see them. And when the images of the gods are made, their eyes are the last part completed. Then when the image is consecrated its eyes are finally opened with a golden needle or the touch of a paintbrush. Sometimes large enamel eyes are inserted in the eye sockets. The bulbous or saucer eyes that make Indian paintings of gods seem bizarre to us are clues to the dominance of vision in the Hindu’s relation to his gods. Many gods, like Siva and Ganesa, have a third eye in the center of their forehead. Brahma, the Thousand-Eyes, regularly has four heads, to look in all directions at once, and sometimes he has leopard-spot eyes all over his body.
For the Hindu, seeing became a form of touching. The Brahmanas, the sacred priestly texts attached to the Vedas, say “The eye is the truth. If two persons come disputing with each other … we should believe him who said ‘I have seen it,’ not him who has said ‘I have heard it.’ ” This intimacy of visual contact explains too why Hindus forbade certain meetings of the eyes in public, not only between lovers but even between husband and wife.
While “seeing” brought sanctity and satisfaction to the Hindu, Western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam found their way through the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us … full of grace and truth.” Western religious traditions were wary of the seen, of the image, and the Protestant Reformation built a theology on this suspicion of all images.
Western religions begin with a notion that One—One God, One Book, One Son, One Church, One Nation under God—is better than many. The Hindu, dazzled by the wondrous variety of the creation, could not see it that way. For so multiplex a world, the more gods the better! How could any one god account for so varied a creation? And why not another alternative between monotheism and polytheism? The Oxford Orientalist Max Müller (1823–1900) who introduced the W
est to the Rig-Veda had to invent a word for the Hindu attitude. Kathenotheism, the worship of one god at a time, described the Hindu way of being awed by the wonders of the Creation. An Olympian democracy allowed the devotee to focus his darśan on one particular god at each moment. But that god was not supreme over all others.
In this tolerant, ever-growing community of gods and goddesses, each divinity was willing to take a turn receiving the darśan of the faithful. None of the nasty envy of the Greek gods whose festering pride and jealousy motivated the Homeric epics! And how unlike the sovereign Creator-God of the Hebrews and Christians and Muslims. “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.” But Vishnu, Siva, and Devi is each momentarily seen as creator, sustainer, and supreme power, each surrounded by a galaxy of lesser gods. The Western worshiper is baffled in his quest for a hierarchy among them. The dazzled vision sees no hierarchy but the mystery expressed in every growing thing. As the Upanishads, commentaries on the Vedas, sang (c.400 B.C.):
“Fetch me a fruit of the banyan tree.”
“Here is one, sir.”
“Break it.”
“I have broken it, sir.”
“What do you see?”
“Very tiny seeds, sir.”
“Break one.”
“I have broken it, sir.”
“Now what do you see?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“My son,” the father said, “what you do not perceive is the essence, and in that essence the mighty banyan tree exists. Believe me, my son, in that essence is the self of all that is. That is the True, that is the Self. And you are that Self, Svertaketu!”
(Translated by A. L. Basham)
It is hardly surprising that the awestruck Hindus never came up with a single grand Creator-God.
Trying all sorts of answers to the riddle of Creation the Rig-Veda offered myths of beginnings. The manifold universe, one story went, was produced from a primeval sacrifice. A primeval man, Prajapati, the Lord of Beings, who existed even before the founding of the universe, was sacrificed. How he came into being, why or to whom he was sacrificed is not clear. The gods themselves appear to have been his children. The “Hymn of the Primeval Man” tells us how the universe emerged:
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