Ground for Creation
I am indebted to my esteemed colleague, Mr Bryan-Williams, for the subject of your Director’s Column today. Tiffin’s celebrated guru on all things historical and educational forwarded me a letter published in The Times on 2 December 2025, from Michael Baum, Professor Emeritus of Surgery and visiting Professor of Medical Humanities at UCL. In the letter, Baum describes a kind of Damascene conversion after seeing Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia in 1993: a moment when his long-held confidence in a purely mechanistic picture of the world gave way to something rather stranger and, perhaps, rather more useful.
Baum writes not as a literary critic but as a surgeon, one whose professional life spanned a period of paradigm shift in cancer treatment, and that is of course what gives his letter its authority. His “Damascene conversion” was precisely the moment he recognised that the purely linear, mechanistic map of medicine was failing to account for the messy, non-linear reality of the body; something which Arcadia also explores. Addressing the nature of the disease, he explains that, at the point of diagnosis, a cancer will often already have scattered malignant cells into the bloodstream, where they lie dormant in distant organs. That hypothesis, initially counter-intuitive, gave rise to adjuvant systemic chemotherapy: treat early, treat systemically, treat indirectly. The result was a striking improvement in survival curves. Baum finishes his Times letter with the words: Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.
This anecdote offers a bracing refutation of C.P. Snow’s famous Two Cultures divide. It demonstrates that deep insight flows not just across the divide between the humanities and the sciences, but by the unexpected collision of fundamentally different ways of seeing the world.
It is a reminder that creativity rarely announces its consequences in advance. Stoppard did not write a medical paper; he wrote a play working the fertile ground of entropy, mathematics, landscape gardening, love and time. From this something unexpected took root elsewhere. An imaginative work altered the conditions in which another mind thought differently, and those altered conditions eventually made their way into operating theatres and oncology wards.
This is the business of creativity as our old friend, Iain McGilchrist understands it: not a product manufactured by sheer force of will, but something that emerges when we enter into a proper relationship with a reality that exceeds us. We do not stand outside the world, engineering outcomes with blueprints and levers; we participate within it, attentively and partially, never wholly in control. Creativity is something we do, but not something we can simply command.
Which is perhaps why the flourishing industry devoted to teaching people how to be creative should always prompt a raised eyebrow. That people make money offering such courses is not, in itself, objectionable; you gotta earn a living after all. But that they sometimes imply creativity can be reliably summoned by following a set of techniques is clearly nonsense. If creativity really could be fully explained, systematised, and replicated on demand, it would promptly cease to be interesting. Or indeed creative.
As we have discussed, the Enlightenment prized the conscious, systematising mind, which is excellent at drawing the map. But what seems always essential to the genuinely creative act is precisely that which resists full illumination: the obscure, the mysterious, the dark and fertile depth out of which something unexpectedly luminous emerges. The work arrives, often surprising even its maker, and only afterwards do we attempt to explain how it came to be. Creativity, like growth, mostly happens out of sight.
Ancient traditions were often more relaxed about this than we are. Some of my readers may be aware that, as a younger Director, I underwent a period of Zen training. In its early stages, the Zen master repeatedly discouraged intellectualisation as a way of tackling life’s difficulties; not because thinking is bad, but because excessive thinking can create an unhelpful interval between the person and their life as it is actually being lived.
We end up, as the saying goes, eating the menu instead of the dinner; valuing money over wealth; or admiring the map so much that we forget to walk the terrain. Alfred Korzybski captured this danger neatly in his warning about “mistaking the map for the territory.” Maps are extremely useful, of course but confusion arises when we begin to treat our representations of reality as though they were reality.
The Zen master wanted me to step off the map and into the territory. In less esoteric terms, this meant entering into relationship with what is, rather than hovering at a safe conceptual distance from it. This attentive participation is precisely the tension explored in Stoppard’s play.
Arcadia is not merely about mathematics or landscape gardening or romantic misadventure (though it is about all three). It is about the limits of control. Enlightenment confidence in symmetry, order, classical gardens, is set alongside the dawning recognition that reality is far less obedient than our designs. The inevitable march of entropy means heat dissipates. Systems decay. Gardens grow unruly. And meaning emerges in fits and starts, or not at all.
The title of Stoppard’s play is doing some quiet philosophical work. Arcadia names an ancient pastoral ideal: a vision of simplicity, harmony, and life lived at the pace of seasons rather than schedules. Originating in a rugged region of Greece and polished smooth by centuries of poetry, Arcadia has long symbolised an unspoilt, if unattainable, way of being an escape from complexity rather than a denial of it.
Creation myths from many cultures echo this same intuition. The world is spoken, sung, breathed into being. Order emerges through rhythm and relationship rather than brute force. In the Judaeo-Christian imagination, humanity is placed in a garden not as conqueror but as custodian: “to tend it and to keep it.” Creation is unfinished; our role is participatory rather than proprietary.
Voltaire in Candide arrives at a similar conclusion. After dismantling grand metaphysical explanations, he leaves us with something stubbornly practical: il faut cultiver notre jardin. We must tend our garden. Not because it solves everything, but because it keeps us grounded in attention, responsibility, and reality.
Literature and philosophy return to this image repeatedly. Wordsworth insists that poetry grows out of feeling recollected in tranquility. Rilke advises the young poet to live the questions patiently. Heidegger warns of the danger of treating the world as mere standing-reserve, like a store of resources awaiting exploitation. Even Wittgenstein suggests that understanding is not forced but learned gradually by discovering how to let go.
Baum’s letter reminds us that this is no merely aesthetic consolation. Creativity changes the conditions in which thinking occurs, and in doing so it can change the conditions of life itself. Stoppard never knew what his play would set in motion. A gardener never knows which seed will flourish. But uncertainty does not imply insignificance.
There is something here, too, for those of our students drawn, quite rightly, to the precision and power of the sciences, and particularly to medicine. Technical mastery matters enormously. But medicine is never only a scientific enterprise. It is also an imaginative and interpretative one. To see patterns obliquely, to tolerate uncertainty, to recognise when insight must come from beyond the expected frame etc. These are not optional extras, but central professional virtues.
For schools more broadly, the lesson is a chastening one. Creativity cannot be mandated, delivered, or audited into existence. But the conditions in which it might arise can be cultivated. Attention can be honoured. Curiosity can be protected from haste and fear. We can choose to be gardeners rather than engineers.
Arcadia, in the end, is not a place to which we can return, nor a state we can fix in place. It is an orientation: towards participation rather than control, patience rather than force, and hope without guarantees. And perhaps that is how all the most important things grow: not by the engineer’s force of will, but by the gardener’s patient, participatory attention.
Until next time, Happy Reading/ Gardening!
This week’s fun answer to last week’s fun question:
Which common English noun consists of only two letters?
Ox
This week’s fun question to answer:
How can 8 + 8 = 4?