Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, final stanza:
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
A comment by Arthur Koestler:
Beauty is a function of truth, truth a function of beauty. They can be separated by analysis, but in the lived experience of the creative act—and of its re-creative echo in the beholder—they are inseparable as thought is inseparable from emotion.
— Koestler (1964, 331)
Say the purpose of consciousness is to reform habits. And what’s the purpose of habits? To sustain viability. And what’s the purpose of viability, i.e. of life? To actualize the possibility of purpose, of attention and intention, to inform the time. To take the meaning cycle for a spin.
How are ‘rest’ and ‘relaxation’ related to the creative side of ‘recreation’? Psychologically, through the sorting-out of experiential traces that goes on during sleep, the ‘incubation’ period which Koestler identified as a precondition for the ‘act of creation’ or discovery. The waking version is something like Peirce’s musement.