Knowledge and Imagination

This summer has been filled with good nights and this was another one. My wife and I took our children out to Pembroke Mall and Copon Studios for a pre-meeting get together with a few business associates. It was a fun night of food wine and wild children running around going crazy.

Copon Studios is a space for families, businesses, and influencers to rent to take selfies, promotional photos, or to film their next viral video. It is a trend that is starting and one of several selfie station places that have opened. The layout and themes are A+. I don’t have a dither with anything we saw tonight except one thing.

One of the selfie stations is nearly perfect for me. It is a leather-backed chair surrounded by books. It is the exact self station someone would choose for me. It is only missing the beluga whales. But, and here is the big but, along the back wall, in neon lights, are the words, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” What a damn pile of horse shit. Pardon my language.

I cannot think of a phrase I would disagree with more or that would be less representative of me. I mean I spent how many of these blog posts discussing my desire to acquire all human knowledge, and here is this phrase raising imagination to a level above knowledge. Believing imagination is more important than knowledge is what gets us anti-vaxxers. They do their own research in their imagination and come up with some hippie-dippy nonsense that convinces them to reject experts.

I am certain that isn’t the essence of the phrase or what was intended by it, but damn their intentions. Knowledge is power and without knowledge there is no imagination. Knowledge and imagination are an interplay. You can’t draw water out of a dry well and without knowledge the well of imagination is useless. There has to be a knowledge base to draw from or there is no imagination.

There are so many better quotes about the power of reading and knowledge than imagination is more important than knowledge. I don’t even know who thinks that way. It is insanity. Madness. We should seek out all the knowledge that we can to build our imagination and soar to the greatest of heights. We should fear not the burning sun because with proper knowledge we will understand how to fly with waxen wings.