The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley by Eric Weiner Page A
Authors: Eric Weiner
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stream twice and he was never the same Socrates.
As the waitress brings another bottle of wine, Alicia tells me how she contracted the Greek bug at an early age. “The ancient authors are more modern than what is being written now,” she says, delighting in the apparent contradiction. “Their writing has an immediacy to it.”
I sip my wine and ponder her words. They explain a lot. They explainwhy Alicia speaks of the ancient Greeks in the present tense. They also explain what distinguishes a good work, even a great one, from a true work of genius. A good poem or painting speaks to people of a certain time. A work of genius, however, transcends those temporal bounds and is rediscovered anew by successive generations. The work is not static. It bends, and is bent by, each new audience that encounters it. As Pablo Picasso said, “There is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present, it must not be considered art at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past, perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.”
If I’m going to understand the Greek mind, Alicia tells me, I need to step back and put myself in their sandals. The Greeks didn’t have a word for “create,” at least not in the way we mean it. If you asked a Greek poet what he was doing, he would say he was engaged in poiesis , literally “to make,” a word that applied equally to making a poem or making a fire or making a mess. “They weren’t trying to do poetry or be creative,” says Alicia. The Greeks created much of what we now consider art, but, as we saw with the vases, didn’t put it on a pedestal. So large did the arts loom in daily life that they were a given. Art was functional. Beauty was a bonus.
This kind of embedded beauty is, I think, the best kind. Today, we go to great lengths to ensure that the rarefied world of art never brushes against our grubby, workaday lives. We have proclaimed art “special” and therefore placed it out of reach.
Alicia knows a thing or two about the intersection of art and life. One day, not that long ago, she was at home with her eight-year-old son. Her husband was at a dentist’s appointment. The phone rang.
“Are you alone?” the caller asked.
Alicia thought this was an odd question. “Well, my son is playing in the other room, but other than that, I am alone. Why?”
That’s when the caller told her that she had been selected as a MacArthur Fellow. It came with a cash award of $500,000, plus the unofficial title of “genius.”
Alicia hung up the phone. That much she remembers. Everything afterward is a blur. If geniuses are the secular world’s gods, Alicia wasnow sitting atop Mount Olympus, peering down at the mortals. The view from up there is nice, but godliness comes not only with benefits but also burdens. For a while she couldn’t breathe. Then she could breathe but couldn’t sleep. This phase lasted two weeks. She would sit up at night excited, but also worried. Worried about an army of envious poets ambushing her. Worried about the unanticipated consequences of her newfound notoriety. Her sudden genius “has been something to navigate,” she says, as if describing a rough patch of white water, or an Athens street during rush hour. “Sometimes I feel like a genius. I mean, the words are flowing. Other times, I write something and think, ‘Do I want to publish this? This is not a work of genius. It’s a crappy poem.’ ”
Finally, the hour late, my head fuzzy from the wine, I decide to ask Alicia a time-travel question. If she could transport herself to Athens circa 450 BC, who would she want to share a bottle of wine with? I fully expect her to say Socrates. The Dude.
“Aspasia,” says Alicia.
“Who was he?”
“She. Aspasia was the consort of Pericles.”
In the classics, we hear little about the women of Athens, and what we do hear is not exactly
As the waitress brings another bottle of wine, Alicia tells me how she contracted the Greek bug at an early age. “The ancient authors are more modern than what is being written now,” she says, delighting in the apparent contradiction. “Their writing has an immediacy to it.”
I sip my wine and ponder her words. They explain a lot. They explainwhy Alicia speaks of the ancient Greeks in the present tense. They also explain what distinguishes a good work, even a great one, from a true work of genius. A good poem or painting speaks to people of a certain time. A work of genius, however, transcends those temporal bounds and is rediscovered anew by successive generations. The work is not static. It bends, and is bent by, each new audience that encounters it. As Pablo Picasso said, “There is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present, it must not be considered art at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past, perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.”
If I’m going to understand the Greek mind, Alicia tells me, I need to step back and put myself in their sandals. The Greeks didn’t have a word for “create,” at least not in the way we mean it. If you asked a Greek poet what he was doing, he would say he was engaged in poiesis , literally “to make,” a word that applied equally to making a poem or making a fire or making a mess. “They weren’t trying to do poetry or be creative,” says Alicia. The Greeks created much of what we now consider art, but, as we saw with the vases, didn’t put it on a pedestal. So large did the arts loom in daily life that they were a given. Art was functional. Beauty was a bonus.
This kind of embedded beauty is, I think, the best kind. Today, we go to great lengths to ensure that the rarefied world of art never brushes against our grubby, workaday lives. We have proclaimed art “special” and therefore placed it out of reach.
Alicia knows a thing or two about the intersection of art and life. One day, not that long ago, she was at home with her eight-year-old son. Her husband was at a dentist’s appointment. The phone rang.
“Are you alone?” the caller asked.
Alicia thought this was an odd question. “Well, my son is playing in the other room, but other than that, I am alone. Why?”
That’s when the caller told her that she had been selected as a MacArthur Fellow. It came with a cash award of $500,000, plus the unofficial title of “genius.”
Alicia hung up the phone. That much she remembers. Everything afterward is a blur. If geniuses are the secular world’s gods, Alicia wasnow sitting atop Mount Olympus, peering down at the mortals. The view from up there is nice, but godliness comes not only with benefits but also burdens. For a while she couldn’t breathe. Then she could breathe but couldn’t sleep. This phase lasted two weeks. She would sit up at night excited, but also worried. Worried about an army of envious poets ambushing her. Worried about the unanticipated consequences of her newfound notoriety. Her sudden genius “has been something to navigate,” she says, as if describing a rough patch of white water, or an Athens street during rush hour. “Sometimes I feel like a genius. I mean, the words are flowing. Other times, I write something and think, ‘Do I want to publish this? This is not a work of genius. It’s a crappy poem.’ ”
Finally, the hour late, my head fuzzy from the wine, I decide to ask Alicia a time-travel question. If she could transport herself to Athens circa 450 BC, who would she want to share a bottle of wine with? I fully expect her to say Socrates. The Dude.
“Aspasia,” says Alicia.
“Who was he?”
“She. Aspasia was the consort of Pericles.”
In the classics, we hear little about the women of Athens, and what we do hear is not exactly
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