Thanks to Robert McFarlane, who taught me a new word today: katascopos. The lesson emerged from his recent Guardian article on Antoine de Saint-Exupery, an author I admire (and was just discussing with my colleague Dan Hubbard–synchronicity indeed):

In Saint-Ex’s writing, we are always seeing down on to the world, and reinterpreting it as a consequence. “A person taking off from the ground,” he once remarked, “elevates himself above the trivialities of life into a new understanding.” The Greeks had a name for the person who saw from above. They called him the katascopos – a word which later came to mean spy, or explorer – and for them, the sight gained from height was close to god-like. Saint-Ex was a katascopos in every sense of the word, and to read his prose – terse, epigrammatic, visionary – is to share in some part that salutary aerial view, that fresh cosmic perspective.

I love the sound of “salutary aerial view.” Perhaps if I say the words over and over again, I will keep alive the possibility of becoming a katascopos, of preserving what Milton calls the “empyreall conceit” (heavenly or cosmic imagination).

From Saint-Exupery’s The Wisdom of the Sands:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.

Saint-Ex, Milton, beg from above / A pattern of your vision!

Thanks to ALDaily for the Guardian link.