No.140. Inside the Box. Everyday thinking about originality would have us believe that all conceptual freshness lay, like pumpkins in a field, somewhere outside the box, the box representing, presumably, home to the limited, manacled mind, immobilized by its own conventionality. But for him, the terrain outside the box, where all daring thinkers supposedly wandered in their quests for newness, was merely a raw, unformed realm and essentially barren. He felt certain that the best, most productive thinking happened Inside the Box, where ideas grew and flourished on the plangent whispers of what had gone before. Culture, he felt, was a continuum, not an aimless and distracting stroll in the woods. And besides, his box--which he had built himself-- was still, to some extent, open, slotted, ventilated. He could always take a fragrant kind of inspiration from the world outside, from the controlled breezes wafting through his floor-to-ceiling fenestration arrangements. People could think outside-the-box if they wanted to, but for him, that endless starting over, always setting back your conceptual clock, always waiting for the key of inspiration to turn and fire up the ignition of newness, was too iffy for him, too much like wishful thinking He preferred his wood-clad silences. His wooden box was, in fact, a little like a sauna. Or one of Wilhelm Reich orgone accumulators. But it wasn't sealed tightly enough for either of those. He found it to be, nevertheless, an entirely delightful cerebral concentrator.

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