The Pebble and the String: an allegory for art

excerpted from an interview with writer Javed Akhtar in Mark Cousins' documentary "The Story of Film" (2011)

"You must have seen children playing with a string and a pebble. They're tying a string to a pebble and they start spinning it over their head. And slowly they keep leaving [makes motion of lowering grip] the string, and it makes bigger and bigger circle. Now, this pebble is the revolt from the tradition. It wants to move away. But the string is the tradition, the continuity of the tradition. It is holding it. But if you break the string, the pebble will fall. If you remove the pebble, the string cannot go that far. This tension of tradition and revolt against the tradition are in a way contradictory but as a matter of fact it is a synthesis: you will always find the synthesis of tradition and revolt against the tradition together in any good art."