Time & Perspective Quote by Arthur Koestler

Originality, Koestler suggests, isn’t a lightning bolt so much as a controlled lapse in memory. The provocation is in that phrase “at the proper moment”: he’s not romanticizing ignorance, he’s praising timing. The mind stocked with facts and habits is also a mind crowded with reflexes, and reflexes are where clichés live. To make something new, you sometimes have to temporarily misplace the very knowledge that keeps you competent.

Koestler’s intent is both practical and faintly suspicious of expertise. As a novelist and a public intellectual shaped by ideologies that promised “new worlds” and delivered dead ends, he understood how established frameworks can become prisons. The subtext reads like a warning to the over-trained: mastery can harden into automaticity, and automaticity is the enemy of surprise. “Forgetting” here is an active technique, closer to unlearning than amnesia. It’s the moment you stop letting prior categories do your thinking for you.

The line also smuggles in a theory of creativity Koestler pursued throughout his work: novelty comes from recombination, from seeing familiar elements at an unfamiliar angle. But you can’t recombine what you’re still treating as sacred. The “proper moment” is the instant you’re about to default to what’s already sanctioned - the safe comparison, the inherited narrative, the expected solution - and you choose, briefly, to step outside the well-lit path. Originality isn’t the absence of knowledge; it’s the disciplined ability to suspend it.