ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that time is a factor of great importance for creativity and culture. Both creativity and cultural experience are dependent on a feeling of safety—not just psychological safety but actual physical safety. Donald W. Winnicott argues that cultural experience begins with creative living and is first manifested in play. To achieve a cultural experience in the Winnicottian sense, safety is best combined with a sense of fullness—of having something worth communicating and sharing. "Cultural experiences", Winnicott wrote, "provide the continuity in the human race that transcends personal experience". Listening to and watching the performance of a great string quartet such as the Emerson reveals several other Winnicottian ideas about cultural experience. When a civilisation is in a state of upheaval or grave uncertainty about its future, cultural experience tends to be one of the first casualties.
