Life's Pleasures Quote by Dorothea Brande

Brande turns the Wright brothers into less a pair of mechanical geniuses than professional nonbelievers. “Smoke screen” is the tell: impossibility isn’t a wall, it’s a manufactured haze, something that looks solid because enough people agree to squint at it. The phrase frames doubt as atmosphere, not argument - a cultural weather system produced by experts, institutions, and common sense. The brothers don’t smash through physics; they fly through other people’s certainty.

That’s classic Dorothea Brande, whose work on creativity is basically an instruction manual for outmaneuvering the inner and outer censors. She’s not praising aviation so much as describing how new work gets made in public: first dismissed, then grudgingly tolerated, then retroactively treated as inevitable. “Flew” does double duty: literal flight and the metaphorical lightness of refusing the heavy, draggy consensus. The line suggests that breakthrough is as much psychological as technological - a shift in what someone is willing to attempt before permission arrives.

The subtext is a rebuke to the gatekeepers of the possible. “Impossibility” here isn’t a neutral assessment; it’s a story society tells to protect itself from embarrassment, expense, and the risk of being wrong. By calling it a smoke screen, Brande hints at complicity: we participate in the fog because it’s comforting, because it makes our own inaction feel prudent. The Wright brothers become her shorthand for the creative act itself: proceed as if the chorus of “can’t” is just bad visibility.