My attention wanders at times from the hard-nosed realities of the business of IP law to the slight soppy yet deeply resonant character of art and creation. The wonderful website Letters of Note introduced me to a letter from the photographer Ansel Adams that includes this gem:
Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.
In very much the same spirit, do not miss Lewis Hyde’s wonderful The Gift.