Time & Perspective Quote by Mason Cooley

Cooley slices culture into two time zones with the calm certainty of someone who has watched trends harden into tradition. "Taste" sounds like a personal preference, but he frames it as an archive: a set of learned discriminations built from what has already been made, already been judged, already been approved by whatever gatekeepers - critics, classrooms, family lore, algorithmic nostalgia - are doing the approving. Taste is memory disguised as instinct.

Then he gives "imagination" the opposite job. Not decoration, not daydreaming, but forward motion: the capacity to propose what the past cannot verify. The subtext is a warning to anyone who confuses refinement with originality. Taste can be exquisite and still fundamentally conservative, because it relies on precedent. Imagination can be messy and still ethically urgent, because it refuses to let precedent set the limits.

Cooley wrote in a late-20th-century American context where "good taste" often functioned as social sorting - the right books on the shelf, the right minimalism in the living room, the right irony in conversation. His line punctures that performance. It suggests that taste is a rearview mirror we keep polishing, while imagination is the windshield we are reluctant to look through.

The brilliance is the quote's compact provocation: it doesn't ask you to abandon taste, it demotes it. Taste curates; imagination invents. One is about belonging. The other is about risk.