Acknowledgments

Because the twentieth century has brought forth dazzling new technologies in the visual arts, people in the present often worry that people in the far future will eventually lose the ability to dream by the book, to let their own minds become the surface on which pictures get made. I do not believe there is a danger of this happening. But should it happen, I hope this book will contribute to the record of how we made mental pictures when they used to get made.

Part One, describing the mental retina—the worktable and vertical floor on top of which vivid images come into being—might have remained private, half-formed thoughts had it not been for the invitation to give the 1992 Avenali Lectures at Berkeley’s Townsend Center. The members of the Berkeley community were incomparable in their intellectual generosity both when I gave the lectures and when this material later appeared in the journal Representations. Stephen Greenblatt, Day Lanier, Richard Wollheim, Marty Jay, Barry Stroud, Cathy Gallagher, Tom Laqueur, Paul Alpers, and Jean Day were among the many people who provided strenuous debate and high merriment.

Parts Two and Three look at the way mental images that move seem to acquire not just the vivacity of sensory fullness but the vivacity of aliveness itself. Drafts and notes written at my windowsill almost every daybreak throughout 1996 were transformed into finished chapters during a crucial 1997 fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. A 1997 grant from Harvard’s Mind–Brain–Behavior initiative also helped move the manuscript toward completion—as did, more indirectly, my ongoing participation, beginning in 1994, in the Mind–Brain–Behavior working groups that bring together, nearly every week, Harvard faculty members from the neurosciences, humanities, and professional schools. Just as research assistant David Gammons made the workday bright during my writing of Part One, Marc Talusan did during the period of Parts Two and Three.

Public responses to the materials in Part One gave me the inspiration and stamina to continue on Parts Two and Three. Wonderfully funny and patient audiences experimented with putting flower petals in their head (chapter 4) at the Center for Fine Arts Design and Theory in Maastrict, Netherlands, at Stanford’s Enlightenment Conference, and at the Getty Research Institute. The solidity of my account of solidity (chapter 2) was tested by a high-spirited audience at Boston University, as well as by my colleagues in Harvard’s Mind–Brain–Behavior faculty.

Had I ever been tempted to interrupt my work on this book, it would have been impossible to do so, given the alertness of archangel Amanda Urban and the encouraging responses arriving from Barry Mazur, Gail Mazur, Peter Sacks, Barbara Kassel, Judith Grossman, Peter Jodaitis, Ellen Walker, Katherine Stern, David Kurnick, Chicu Reddy, Ramie Targoff, and Michel Chaouli.

I cannot adequately state the fullness of my thanks to Greg Nagy and Emory Elliott, who—at the point where there was at last a complete manuscript—read it from its first to its final page, and did so as though there were no greater pleasure in the world than testing a new book at the winter solstice, when days are shortest and the piles of obligations are highest. I cannot imagine greater knowledge pressing down on a manuscript, nor more generous-hearted readings.

At Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I have everyday benefited from the artistry, knowledge, and kindness of Elisabeth Sifton, Mia Berkman, Carmen Gomezplata, Susan Mitchell, and Jeff Seroy. Each time I referred above to the “finished” manuscript or a “completed” chapter, it would have been more accurate to say “hardly finished” or maybe even “starkly uncompleted.” Only once the book entered the hands of my formidable and laughter-loving editor was it transformed into a finished object, a fresh object. Elisabeth Sifton soon seemed to know the manuscript by heart; she and Carmen Gomezplata read it with exquisite care and the will to make each page new.

What helped me keep up with successive copy-editing, proofs, and indexing was a 1999 stay at the Getty Research Institute, and the expert assistance of Ayana Haviv, Nick Davis, and Eva Scarry. Memorable too was the incredible grace of Bill Todd, who patiently answered pressing questions about Russian, even as he boarded a plane to lecture in a foreign country. Todd Kelly and Joe Scarry were as unfailing in their day-by-day help in this final period as in all the earlier days and years of work on the book.

I began here with events in 1992 and ended with 1999, but I want to describe three much earlier moments, key to the making of this book.

The first was when I was twenty-six. Jack Davis invited me (along with a hundred other people listening to him lecture about conviction in St. Paul, Pascal, and van Gogh) to imagine the room of all rooms I would most like to be in, then to compare it to the real room in which I sat. The experiment lasted only ninety seconds, but the outcome was devastating to me: the daydreamed room could not compare to the rush of perceptual events in the real room; the Imagination around which I centered my young life had just been hurled to the ground; I was supposed to be near the end of my formal education; now I would have to start all over again.

It took me a long time to recover. But the event started me watching the way images take shape in the mind—not just the content of images (these I had always watched) but their actual comings and goings at the moment of mental composition. Far from being dethroned, the image-making powers of the mind before long began to seem to me even more miraculous than I had originally supposed—for what we do in the presence of Homer or Sappho or Brontë or Kincaid is not continuous with ordinary daydreaming or with the way mental images enter into daily perceptual acts. But what accounts for the difference?

A second breakthrough moment came maybe ten years later when I was one day telling Philip Fisher about the window on the staircase at my grandfather’s house where the blades of grass grew at eye level. Although he had listened to details about this house countless times before, for some reason he this time interrupted to inquire what was to the left of the window, and when I told him, he at once inquired what was to the right; and when I answered, he at once asked some third question … but by now I had risen to my feet to bring the conversation to a sudden stop. In the course of those nine seconds the staircase had come rushing in around me with such unnegotiable vibrancy that three seconds more and I might never again have been able to climb back out to the actual room. Weeks later I realized that the stark difference between the two staircase windows (the one freely composed, the other composed according to an externally imposed sequence) provided an important clue to the discontinuity between daydreaming and dreaming by the book.

The third moment occurred in the summer preceding the Berkeley Avenali lectures. I had long been working on a book about war and social contract, but I had already spoken about this subject at Berkeley four times. Should I try to speak about this new problem of image-making that I had not yet lifted into audible conversation? Would it make sense; would others see its urgent importance? It was my great good fortune to consult Helen Vendler and Allen Grossman at this time: each gave crucial suggestions about poems to read but, more important, both at once knew exactly what I was talking about. How easily I might have stopped in my tracks without the sheer lucidity of their instant understanding.

My deepest thanks, then, to Jack Davis, Philip Fisher, Helen Vendler, and Allen Grossman, as well as to the perennial underground of flower-obsessed writers and flower-loving siblings and friends.