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"Just Imagine," purrs the New Ager's bumper sticker, and dorm room posters feature Einstein's line "Imagination is more important than knowledge" over a blurry photo of a seagull. How we love to babble vaguely about that noble concept we call creativity.

In my blog post on Monday I confessed that I seem to think of imagination and creativity as, in general, "herd-free thinking," as a way of diligently following your own compass. But that definition is too broad to mean much. Obviously I don't have answers to that question or to anything else. I'm not even terribly interested in answers. "Try to love the questions themselves," intoned Rilke, which raises another question: What good is poetic imagination, considering that such a wonderful poet was such a crappy human being? I can't answer that one either.

Recently some friends and I were talking so naturally I brought up this topic: "What is imagination?"

"It's what distinguishes Homo sapiens from other apes."

"No, our hallmark is accessorizing."

"Surely our most species-distinctive accomplishment is porn."

"People, please. It's like Short Attention-Span Theater around here. What about chimpanzees who learn to manipulate a bunch of levers and gears and stuff to finally get to the banana that they can see on the other side of a laboratory? How is that not imaginative thinking?"

"Well, sure, it's all the same spectrum. So all apes have it."

"What about dogs learning tricks? They have to hold a mental image of the trick and the reward in their brain, right? Imagination. I rest my case."

"What case?"

"I dunno, I just like to say that."

"But by that standard, beaver are very imaginative because they can look at trees and envision them nibbled down and turned into a beaver dam.

"Well, but are they really imagining that, or are they just following instinct?"

"So imagination can't be instinctive?"

"Hmm, good point. Pass the wine."

"And what about bees building a hive? Surely they have some kinda hexagonal blueprint in their itsy-bitsy brain before they start building, right?"

"Well, I dunno, now we're down to the most basic instinctive-"

"Think about Darwin looking around-"

"Oh, God, he's going on about Darwin again."

"-looking around at the world and slowly letting himself think outside the definition of a species as a hard and fast rule. He was thinking, What if all this has changed and is still changing? I mean, looking again at what we've already seen but not understood before: what could be more imaginative than that? And Galileo did the same thing. He actually pointed a telescope at the sky and said, ‘Oh. My. God. I'm watching sunrise on the moon.' "

"He's quoting from his new book again. I know you're always saying how scientists are as creative as artists-"

"I say that both endeavors are an exercise of imagination."

"Remember back in the Dark Ages when Ronny Raygun was in the White House and when he wasn't dying his hair or dozing off he was saying, ‘Why should we underwrite intellectual curiosity?' Yet what's more worthwhile, more uniquely human?"

"Are we talking about creativity and originality and imagination as all the same thing?"

 "I think they all come from the same urge, don't you? I mean, how are they different?"

"And where's the evolutionary rationale for that? We evolved to change things? We're the restless animal? We tinker?"

"Exactly."

"But true originality-"

"Uh-oh, she's going to emit an epigram."

"Think about Ezra Pound's line. Didn't the archangel of modernism once proclaim the first commandment of art for the twentieth century? It was ‘Make it new.'"

"I'm not sure what you just proved with that. When Pound said that, he was quoting Confucius."

Michael Sims, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime, Penguin Classic, Penguin Books