Life's Pleasures Quote by Donald G. Mitchell

Mitchell flatters the reader, then slips in a quiet demand: if you can “catch food for dreams,” you’re responsible for feeding them. The line is built on a double negative (“No man’s…so dull…so blind…that they cannot”), a rhetorical move that widens the gate as far as it will go. Genius isn’t the entrance fee. Attention is. In an era that loved moral improvement and self-culture, Mitchell’s optimism isn’t naïve so much as strategic: he’s arguing that imagination is not a luxury for the refined, but a basic human faculty available even to the exhausted, the uneducated, the socially sidelined.

“Catch” is the crucial verb. Dreams don’t arrive as divine telegrams; they’re scavenged, hunted, gathered from the ordinary world. That turns the romantic idea of inspiration into a kind of everyday labor. The “brain” and the “eye” stand in for intellect and perception, but Mitchell pairs them to suggest that dreaming is both thinking and seeing, an act of interpretation as much as an act of desire. If your eye isn’t “blind,” the world is already offering material; the failure is less incapacity than neglect.

There’s also a democratic sting beneath the comfort. By insisting that no one is disqualified, Mitchell removes a common alibi: “I’m not the type.” The sentence becomes a nudge toward curiosity, reading, wandering, noticing - the small habits that keep inner life from starving, especially in a culture increasingly organized around utility.