part 15

140 People need play as well as work, though, if your interest is deep enough, work and play can be the same thing. To some people all their best work is a sort of play. They get so much pleasure from it and are so interested in it that they work when they don't need to. They are doing what they want most to do. It was the philosopher Plato who said, "All learning is best done as play. Nothing learned under pressure takes root rightly in the mind. So let children's work be a sort of play." (Republic, 537.)

141 People need work and play for the body and for the mind. They need music... and dancing.… …rest and change. (See EP 1, p. 266.) They need books and talk with others: with old friends as well as with new people. They need new knowledge to keep their old knowledge clear and living. A friend is someone you know and love and with whom you have much in common. People you know only a little are not your friends in this sense, though they may become your friends if you get to know them better.

142 People need to see beautiful things and to have beautiful things about them. Drawing goes back very far into our past. The drawings of animals copied on this page may have been made as early as 25,000 B.C.

143 Drawing can help to make ideas easier—the pictures drawn in this book, for example. But the greatest drawing and painting and sculpture can make our highest powers come into play. The drawings below are of two pieces of sculpture, one from India and the other from Africa.

144 We need to hear beautiful things. Music may go back still farther in time than the other arts, but unhappily we have no records of music before the discovery of writing. As with language the writing of music may have started with pictures. Today not only do we have ways of writing down music, but we can make copies of the sound of music as it is played.

145 We need to make beautiful things. Today the great cities of the world have public art galleries and museums where anyone may see the paintings and drawings and sculpture of artists through the centuries.