So Many Books

In the last third of Emerson’s lecture, “Natural History of Intellect,” He writes of talent and genius. I can’t say that I agree with much he says here, maybe it is a matter of semantics or a different perspective on life, I just think he got it wrong. I could also have missed something in my reading, but, well, let’s just get on with it shall we?

Here is the crux of it all. Emerson sees two theories of life “one for the demonstration of our talent, the other for the education of the man.” Follow your talent and you get “usefulness, comfort, society, [and] low power of all sorts.” Take the education route, the route of genius, and you get “trust, religion, consent to be nothing for eternity, entranced waiting, [and] the worship of ideas.” Which one do you think Emerson praises? Which one do you think he calls “solitary, grand, secular?”

I don’t understand why talent and genius have to be diametrically opposed, nor why Emerson believes that if a person chooses the route of talent, genius is sacrificed. He sees talent as “ambitious and self-asserting,” as working “for show and for the shop.” It is as though he believes that talent is tawdry and unseemly and not something that can be put into the service of genius, that the use to which talent is put can only be for the purpose of personal and financial gain.

Emerson often stresses in his essays the importance of staying true to oneself and he brings it up again here. If we look at Nature and what strength lies there, we will see that the strength of a tree is that it is always a tree and never tries to be something it is not, it has “no duplicity, no pretentiousness.” The problem with humans is that we get distracted from who we are and try to be something or someone else:

He rows with one hand and with the other backs water, and does not give to any manner of life the strength of his constitution. Hence the perpetual loss of power and waste of human life.

Instead of thinking our own thoughts and coming to our own conclusions, we borrow other people’s forgetting that we “can’t make any paint stick but [our] own.”

But, oddly, while Emerson wants us to follow education/genius, he does not seem to encourage us to be what we think of as “Renaissance men,” those like Da Vinci who studied many subjects and knew a lot about many things. Instead, Emerson appears to be advocating in the name of concentration, a narrowness of study. He acknowledges that a narrow concentration precludes one from looking at other things but insists that just as a horse goes better with blinders, so too will a person be more dedicated to her task. Emerson believes that the narrow focus will be compensated because “in learning one thing well you learn all things.” Personally, I think that’s poppycock. No, we can’t study everything, but by studying only one thing the blinders will keep us from seeing something important. Not being able to look up from the study at hand, you miss the answer, or the question that will help you find an answer that is madly waving at you for your attention just outside you field of vision. You miss the big picture and how your knowledge connects with that person’s knowledge and so on.

The history of humanity as Emerson sees it is one of “arrested growth.” He thinks we start off well as children but are stopped prematurely at the age of two or three. He doesn’t explain what stops us, but he does say that we are not stopped forever, that as adults we can make advances. What a relief!

When I think of talent and genius, it seems to me that in order to have genius, one must have talent. I consider talent to be natural ability and genius to be the results of education and refinement of that ability. It would do me no good to study geometry if I had no talent for it. Nor would it do me any good to study cellular biology if I had no talent in understanding how it all worked to drive my interest or study. I don’t believe Emerson advocates studying something we have no interest in–that would fall under not being true to yourself–but isn’t it generally the case, that the things we are interested in and want to educate ourselves on are the things for which we have a talent?

Maybe I am just quibbling. Maybe what Emerson is trying to get at is that by putting my talent to work in order to become rich and famous, to “be somebody” is the wrong way to go. Becoming a doctor because I want to be like House is not being true to myself. Or maybe more realistically, becoming a librarian because I want to be like Nancy Pearl. Maybe talent shouldn’t be put to work. Maybe talent should be like a well from which we draw cool and refreshing drafts to fuel our genius, to spur us on, and to remind us why we chose the path that we did.

Next week’s Emerson: “Instinct and Inspiration”