Monday September 27, 2021; 7:24 PM EDT
- First, two quotations to use as a test case.#
- Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one. ~Nicholas Berdyaev#
- When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist. ~Dom Helder Camara#
- Putting two ideas next to each other like that creates an opportunity for writing and thinking. There's something as yet unsaid, perhaps as yet unknown, that might link them. And the link will need to be illustrated and tested.#
- As democracy (for men of a certain class, anyway) was developing in ancient Athens, men who were citizens understood the need to generate fresh thought for speeches they were now called upon as citizens to give.#
- They called the art of generating ideas for speeches invention. They found ways to make it happen. Putting two things side by side and talking about them together was one method of invention that they had in their toolkit.#
- It sounds almost naive to say that something as simple as putting things side by side can really speed along thinking and writing, but just imagine how many sentences it would take to construct, illustrate, and test a conceptual bridge between those sentences by Berdyaev and Helder.#
- And putting two ideas side by side is easy in an outliner, and writing the bridge that links them is handy too. #