1 apple + 1 little boy = a discovery about the creativity in each of us:
A couple of years ago, my oldest son accosted me with news from kindergarten as I came home from my office at Harvard University. He had learned something about apples and wanted to demonstrate. Out of the drawer came a knife, one of those he was not supposed to handle, and out of the refrigerator a McIntosh. "Dad," he said, "Let me show you what's inside an apple."
"I know what's inside an apple," I said, riding for a fall.
"C'mon, just let me show you."
"Listen, I've cut open lots of apples. Why ruin an apple just to show me something I already know?"
"Just take a look."
Ungracefully, I gave in. He cut the apple in half - the wrong way. We all know the right way to cut apples. One starts at the stem and slices through to the dimple on the bottom. However, he turned the apple on its side, sliced the apple in half perpendicular to the stem, and displayed the result. "See, Dad. There's a star inside."
Sure enough, there was. In cross section, the core of the apple made a distinct five-pointed star. How many apples I had eaten in my life, cutting them in half the right way and never suspecting the hidden pattern waiting for me! Then one day my child brought news of it home, out to convert the infidel - and he did.
I have not tried to find out, but I'm sure this star-shaped structure is common knowledge in botany, where no doubt there are students of apples who do dissections of McIntosh and Golden Delicious, nibbling the scraps as they go. Whoever first sliced an apple the "wrong" way may well have had a good reason to do so, curiosity being one good reason. Or it might have been one of those fruitful - I use the word carefully - mistakes all of us make sometimes. What struck me then and still impresses me now is that this hidden pattern fascinated enough to make its way around. The knowledge of it traveled from unknown origins to my son's kindergarten class and so to me and now to you. Its very survival and vigor as something to know about vouches for the engagement we find in discovery.
So, if you want to know what creativity is about, in part it's about an apple - sliced the "wrong" way.
- David Perkins, The Mind's Best Work (1981)
(I came upon this excerpt in the September 1982 issue of Family Circle magazine)