The very best issues in life we don’t select — they select us. An excellent love, an amazing calling, an amazing illumination — they occur unto us, like gentle falling upon that which is lit. We’ve got given a reputation to those unbidden greatnesses — genius, from the Latin for “spirit,” denoting the spirit of a universe we will solely undergo however can not govern.
A technology after Wordsworth outlined the proof of genius as “the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (Could 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) took up the thriller of genius — the place it comes from, the way it shapes the lives it befalls, and what it calls for of them — in a beautiful essay on one other nice poet — Shakespeare — present in his indispensable Essays (public library).
In a powerful reply to the abiding query of whether genius is born or made, Emerson writes:
There is no such thing as a option to genius. An excellent man doesn’t get up on some high-quality morning, and say, “I’m lively, I’ll go to sea, and discover an Antarctic continent: to-day I’ll sq. the circle: I’ll ransack botany, and discover a new meals for man: I’ve a brand new structure in my thoughts: I foresee a brand new mechanic energy:” no, however he finds himself within the river of the ideas and occasions, pressured onward by the concepts and requirements of his contemporaries.
In a sentiment James Baldwin would echo in his own superb meditation on Shakespeare, through which he noticed that “the best poet within the English language discovered his poetry the place poetry is discovered: within the lives of the folks,” Emerson provides:
Each grasp has discovered his supplies collected, and his energy lay in his sympathy together with his folks, and in his love of the supplies he wrought in.
This recognition that artwork works with the uncooked supplies of life undermines the cult of originality, which is itself the nice hubris of the artistic spirit — as Mark Twain wrote to Helen Keller, “all concepts are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from one million exterior sources.” Stripping true creativity of this fetish for originality, Emerson anticipates Oscar Wilde’s insistence that creativity is the product of “the temperament of receptivity” and observes:
Nice genial energy, one would nearly say, consists in not being authentic in any respect; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and struggling the spirit of the hour to cross unobstructed by the thoughts.
Couple with Schopenhauer on the crucial difference between genius and talent, then revisit Emerson on becoming your most authentic self and the key to living with presence.
