Inspiration And Me

Today I write about inspiration as part of the Blog It Forward mash-up organised by Victoria. Scroll to the bottom to see all other blogs participating today and to check where we are going tomorrow. Image by Katarina K I've always found the relationship between 'inspiration' and 'inspirational' intriguing. Although intrinsically linked to each other, one being the noun, the other the adjective, it is clear to me that they are used as synonyms of sorts while their purposes and reasons for being are, in fact, very different. When I think of them, I am reminded of Coleridge's seemingly hair-splitting exercise in Biographia Literaria, where he went to great lengths in order to articulate the differences between fancy and imagination. I wish he had done the same for inspiration and inspirational, for these two remind me of those faux amis we were told about in French class, those terms whose meaning you think you know, while you really do not. When I was a child, I was always inspired. I was a prolific writer and I used to fill notebooks with drawings and sketches. Not once did I sit on the sofa with the cushion on my lap and asked myself what to fill the pages with. If there was paper and a pen, there was the process and the finished product. Ideas were coming to me not from the outer world but from the inner one. It was not magazines, toys or cartoons that inspired me; it was an... Read more →