Truly to  exercise our imagination is to unpeel the patina of familiarity from everyday reality, to untake the taken for granted, to encounter what is out there as if for the first time. In short it is to cultivate and articulate astonishment at our infinitely rich, profoundly mysterious world. It is this that unites the endeavours of the poet, the novelist, and the philosopher.

Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist, cultural critic, retired medical physician and clinical neuroscientist, and author of fiction, three volumes of poetry, and 23 books on the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art and cultural criticism, including In Defence of Wonder, Reflections of a Metaphysical Flaneur, Epimethean Imaginings, The Enduring Significance of Parmenides, and The Kingdom of Infinite Space.