It feels these days like the imagination is under siege. ChatGPT is writing iambic pentameter, building websites at the click of a button and removing the last jobs for which our children might have been qualified. What is going to happen next? The truthful answer is that no one knows. Great technological leaps (steam, electricity, the internet) tend to play out in unpredictable ways: as the American scientist Roy Amara once said of such revolutions, we over-estimate their impact in the short term and under-estimate their effects in the long term.
Even before these developments, one was sensing a growing constriction in freedom of thought. With every observation and thought transmitted and parsed on digital channels in real time by an anonymous and unforgiving audience, why would any young person risk a new idea? And what of artistic ventures? Will AI-generated work one day hang in the National Gallery or win the Booker Prize? Some think so, but I’m not so sure. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were he tweeting from the grave, would say Artificial Intelligence will never produce great works of art because it lacks that vital human capacity for feeling.
When I embarked on my new book, The Imagination Muscle, two years ago, the idea of putting the imagination back at the centre of our lives – studying it, treasuring its transform-ative power – seemed a benign one, but I hoped of perennial interest. Now it feels urgent, essential, laced with a mingling of excitement and nervousness of an uncertain future.
It’s all change at Condé Nast as we decamp later in the year to new offices off the Strand. Vogue House, our headquarters for six decades, has been instantly known to taxi drivers, photographed by passing Japanese fashion students and provided fodder for gossip columns from lunches with royalty to – a far bigger story – the tragic death of Tatler Alan, the dachshund caught in the revolving door.
I have mixed feelings about leaving. The building is old and creaky and the receptionist breaks out into a visible sweat in the days leading up to Anna Wintour’s visits in case, as it often does, the unreliable lift containing her comes to a juddering halt between the third and fourth floors. It also lacks any communal space. Our new office is open plan, designed (as I advocate in my book) for serendipity. I write: an office “must reflect the mixed needs of the introvert and the extrovert in the blend of public spaces … success comes not in constant connection but – like a well-functioning city – in the intermittent and varied interactions of different types of individuals”.
The newly renovated Hanover Square will surely miss us: the coffee shops and sushi bars will be bereft, having to make do with the hedge funders who will come to occupy the gleaming new building that will one day rise up to take Vogue House’s place. On reflection, I expect they will manage.
On a more cheerful dog theme, I head out from Vogue House to the launch of Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney Dogs, the latest exhibition delivered under the eye of the Wallace Collection’s new dynamic Chair, Jessica Pulay, and its director Xavier Bray. All of smart London is there – editors, writers, big beasts of business – mingling in the courtyard. I feel like an interloper; I’ve never had a dog nor have any intention of getting one. But there is much to admire in the art: Leonardo, Landseer, Freud. I predict the show will be a hit. As I leave, I decide there is something very civilised, slightly eccentric and rather reassuring about a society where busy people will cross town to celebrate the grand reveal of a series of canine portraits.
My father, Piers Paul Read, is ever alert to familial slights to the Faith. At Sunday lunch, he points at a section of The Imagination Muscle entitled “The benefits of not paying too much attention in Church”. He asks exactly what I mean. I answer – while calmly forking the roast potatoes – that ritual can provide a useful declutch from consciousness, a roaming into that fertile territory between wakefulness and dreaming. In this particular case, a dull Presbyterian sermon in St Paul, Minnesota, led Arthur Fry, a chemical engineer, to dream up the Post-It Note.
My book explores the vast and thrilling expanses of the mind but it also cites religion’s historic nervousness of the imagination; a fear of a power that, if let loose, might upset some higher authority and bring punishment raining down. St Thomas Aquinas wrote: “Demons are known to work on men’s imagination, until everything is other than it is.” The Old Testament consistently warns humans off their natural curiosity to bite into apples and build towers into the sky. Of Babel, God frets: “This is but the start of their undertakings!”
But, like Artificial Intelligence, the relationship between the imagination and religion is double-edged. Dogma and tradition can block difficult questions, but religion also provides the narrative for systems of belonging. It fuels purpose within a moral framework. It is often the anvil on which the artist strikes for the spark. With Catholicism, we can brush aside its less imaginative moments and admire instead the Gothic cathedrals, the works of its great composers, the Pietà by Michelangelo, Leonardo’s The Last Supper, the Cistercian abbeys, Bolivia’s Carnival de Oruro and the novels of Graham Greene. I point out to my father: they’re all in my book.
The roast beef is passed around the table. I think I am off the hook.
The Imagination Muscle by Albert Read is published by Constable.
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