The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry

Imagination is the ability to enter someone else’s mind. To penetrate another’s experience. To feel what another feels: to see the world as they see it, to suffer their pain, participate in their sins and in their triumphs, loves, fears and hopes. Imagination is a product of memory and sympathy. Some have it, just as some have perfect pitch or athletic hand-eye coordination. Or maybe some can be trained to have it, I don’t know. A paradox is that it seems harder to penetrate one’s own mind, participate in one’s own experience and discover one’s own feelings than those of another. You might find it easier genuinely to imagine what it is to be a Guatemalan coffee grower or a Siberian oil-pipe welder, really to see the world as they see it, smell it, understand it and experience it, than to imagine what is like to be yourself, the reader of this sentence, the owner of your own eyes and personality.