"Pretty women ought to be left to men without imagination". (Marcel Proust)
"Take my hand, I'm a stranger in paradise, all lost in a wonderland". (Tony Bennett)
Imagination may be broadly characterized as a capacity to consider possibilities that are not actually present to the senses. The imaginative capacity forces us to be concerned not only with the present circumstances, but also with past and future circumstances. Indeed, people think about the future more than about the past or the present, and many potential events are more pleasurable to imagine than to experience.
One of our greatest advantages over animals is our capacity to imagine complex circumstances that significantly differ from our present ones. However, the capacity to imagine, which unchains us from the present, chains us to the prospect of the possible.
The great human blessing—that is, our capacity to be aware of possible scenarios—is also our fundamental curse, as it affords us realization of our profound limitations as well as our imminent death. When Engelbert Humperdinck asks, "Please release me and let me go, for I don't love you anymore," he refers to the chains of the present. Granting his request is easy these days, as there are fewer formal, social, and practical bonds to impede desertion.
A more profound difficulty lies in the chains of the possible: We have become slaves to many tempting romantic options available in modern life—the Internet, business trips, and cell phones all facilitate various romantic and sexual possibilities. The chains of potential possibilities prevent us from enjoying or even being comfortable with our present lot and are often harder to escape from the chains of the present. We tend to get used to the chains of the present, as we really have no other choice. It is harder to cope with the chains of the possible, as this realm, bounded only by our imagination, is extremely exciting. The present may make us somewhat sad, but the realm of the possible makes us restless and continually disappointed. Coping with the mixed blessing of the possible requires us to establish a normative order of priority in the form of ideals and boundaries. As we establish a set of normative priorities, we shall often find ourselves giving up an ideal or violating a certain boundary.
The constant search for the possible often prevents people from finding love. Several love songs refer to this issue: "You can't be happy, while your heart’s on the roam, you can't be happy until you bring it home" (The Brothers Four). And, "My lonely heart wonders if there'll ever come a day, when I can be happy, but I can't see no way, because I let my mind wonder... (Willie Nelson).
The present is a kind of a confining shelter: it protects us from possible threatening events, but it also prevents us from enjoying possible favorable events. Leaving our narrow shelter forces us to cope not only with actual circumstances, but with possible ones as well. The existence of infinite possibilities emphasizes our deficiencies and limitations, since these possibilities could be better than the situation at hand. Imagination can make us acutely aware of desirable situations that are beyond our reach, morally improper situations, as well as undesirable but inevitable situations. Knowledge of such possibilities and of our inability to either approach or avoid them entails awareness of our basic human limitations. Rosa, a single mother involved in an affair with a married man but nevertheless insists that because of moral reasons, she typically "did not feel attracted to married men." In an interview cited in the book, In the Name of Love, Rosa expresses her grasp of the limitation resulting from the gap between her desires and her circumstances thus: "As long as I stay with the present gifts of our relationship (and there are so many), and I don't wander into fantasies about the future, I am much happier. I value our relationship and I would not try to terminate it just because of its built-in limitations. I am simply trying to navigate appropriately."
In the movie Adaptation, a married woman (Meryl Streep), says that adaptation is easier for plants, as they have no memory, “They just move on to whatever's next. With a person though, adapting is almost shameful. It's like running away.” Plants also do not have expectations for the future, and in general they lack the imaginative power; hence, they cannot consider values and possible alternatives. Referring to the potentially possible enables us not only to postulate moral ideals and rules, but also to undermine them by imagining ways to violate them.
Imagining the possible is a two-edge sword: It is a gift, but one that bites. I do not see a way to refuse the gift; I cannot think of a way to avoid its bites.
