Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love? ¹

Chesterton, in Orthodoxy ², is saving my life. He is helping me from going mad. I have a far to strong bent to the analytic. I would emphasize with Chesterton that logic is not bad it is just that it has the potential to lead to madness.

"The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." ³

I return; God help me be more like a poet. Here is the pivotal paragraph:

"Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health." ⁴

Ravi Zacharias often quotes a wonderfully freeing portion of a William Blake poem:

This life's dim windows of the soul,
distorts the heavens from pole to pole,
and goads you to believe a lie,
when you see with and not through the eye. ⁵