Foxy Thinking: why we should embrace ignorance and learn to love uncertainty
"The grand perhaps! We look on helplessly, there the old misgivings, crooked questions are." Robert Browning Ted Hughes' poem The Thought Fox is an attempt to describe the mysteries of the creative process of writing a poem. We can imagine him sitting at his desk, staring in the dark, slowly become aware of a flickering presence and the awareness that "something else," an idea, "is alive". Hughes imagines this idea as a fox which makes his way into his mind at first tentatively: "Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf" and then take hold with startling [...]