 Collingwood says nothing in direct reply to this worry, but I think it obvious that the reply would be this. In so far as I was conscious of the orange, it is true that I was involved in expression. But this conscious experience was un-sustained, fleeting, and lacking in depth (307). Furthermore, it took place in a mind that was busy with other things, and which was dominated by an overarching purpose, namely to eat the orange, whose sub-tasks include selecting it, peeling it, putting a section in my mouth, trying not spill too much juice, and so on; all this would be written down in my practical guide to eating oranges. Life, then, is full of ‘artworks’, but they are mostly shallow, unworthy of comment. However, there are times when consciousness settles on something, such that the mental activity does approach the character of art, in the proper sense of the word. Sitting in a park, for example, we might dwell on the look of an oak tree, or suddenly think of an original stanza of poetry, or a snatch of melody. These are instances of imaginative expression, and are closer to what we should ordinarily call a work of art. But they are likely to be lost, unless some record of the experience is made. The ‘artist’, then, is one who has these experiences of consciousness more deeply than the average person, and who has mastered the practice of preserving them.