Puck of Pook's Hill

Patterns in a life become clearer in retrospect, as the shape of a landscape reveals itself with a longer perspective. Each of my historical projects, such as they are, seemed at the time to begin with a chance encounter, something glimpsed by accident: a portrait reproduced, a scene from a film, a paragraph in a book browsed at random. It was like walking along a path in the countryside with views all round, when across the path in front darted some unidentified creature, coming from the unknown, vanishing into the unknown, intent on its own purposes; and something about it made me say to myself: I have to know more about that. I didn’t ask at the time why this particular sighting and not another should have been so compelling. It is only now, by a process of accumulation, that I can begin to see the common factor and can trace, if not the reasons, at least the first occurrence.

Accident (philosophy) · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Front (military) · Geography · Linguistics · Paragraph · Path (computing) · Perspective (graphical) · Portrait · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · Computer Science · History · Jungian Analytical Psychology · Philosophy