Curtain Ishmael. Yes, I’ve decided to publish the whole documentation — including the useless, page-filling quotes. But the quotes are really good! I have to say a few words about this one …

It’s from Herman Melville, in Moby Dick. Ishmael says it, somewhere at the beginning. Of course he’s not talking about a bachelor’s thesis or creativity, but about life on a whaler.

It’s the only suitable quote to open the thesis. I hadn’t read Moby Dick. Captain Ahab and his white whale came to mind when I was looking for image inspiration for the tarot cards, about a year after starting to work on the thesis. So I listened to the audio book. After about ten minutes, the first-person narrator Ishmael says this sentence and it hit me somewhere right between the head and the heart.

At that point, I had long been a slave to my own bachelor’s thesis. Like Ahab, completely mad and totally obsessed with my creative project. A not-so-small part of the thesis will deal with that, madness and obsession. I’m afraid creativity might need some madness and obsession.