Given that no one says so much as a word, it's remarkable that "Shaun the Sheep" can sustain its inventiveness, both in terms of overall plot developments and small moments of comedy, for an 86-minute length, but it does.
"Having read him book by book," Mr. McClatchy said of Merrill, "I was surprised by the sheer bulk of his achievement when it's all put together, and struck too by the sustained brilliance and inventiveness of it, the restless search for new experiences within which to explore old obsessions".
The latter meant probably severing the very connections that had sustained one's inventiveness.
And the benefits of the mind are not to be overlooked; greater time in nature can help children develop a healthy interior life, greater mental acuity, inventiveness, and sustained intellectual development.
From the seventeenth-century arms industry through twentieth-century Nobel-awarded work in lasers, Russia has failed to sustain its technological inventiveness.
But although Metheny's appetite for work and taxingly different musical settings seems inexhaustible, he sustains a remarkable inventiveness, and a relaxed attitude.
Isaacson calls him a "creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries". Even more crucially, the biographer adds, "Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation". Being innovative doesn't mean that every product or idea will work.
But, instead of being thrilled by his inventiveness, we've come to take it for granted, and when the fruits of all this cunning hyperactivity are gathered in one place it's easy to lose sight of the artist's sustained, show-after-show achievement.
Diasporas have sustained us.
