A Bee in a Pot of Honey

"....I want to make beauty, not be drowned in the ready-made, like a bee in a pot of honey."

---Edith Wharton, The Reef (1912)

The next few entries will feature Edith Wharton's The Reef.

On Creativity

Constructiveness is as genuine and irresistible an instinct in man as in the bee or the beaver. Whatever things are plastic to his hands, those things he must remodel into shapes of his own, and the result of the remodeling, however useless it may be, gives him more pleasure than the original thing. The mania of young children for breaking and pulling apart whatever is given them is more often the expression of a rudimentary constructive impulse than of a destructive one.

--William James, The Principles of Psychology