Genius can in this sense be defined as paying closer attention to our real thoughts and feelings and being brave and tenacious enough to hold onto them even when they find no immediate echo in the world beyond. They are giving clear and powerful articulation to notions that are already familiar because we’ve been circling them ourselves, possibly for years, without quite ever being able to close in on them properly. What they present feels surprising and impressive, of course yet also obvious and right – once it has been pointed out. We ourselves will often have had our own sketchy, hesitant version of their ideas – which is why their works can have such a distinctive impression on us. What this tells us is that the genius doesn’t have different kinds of thoughts from the rest of us. In the minds of geniuses, we find – once more – our own neglected thoughts.
It’s a codeword for ‘brilliant but perhaps too other-worldly ever really to fathom.’ We are invited to stand in awe at the achievements of geniuses but also to feel that their thought processes might be quasi-magical and that it is ultimately simply mysterious how they were ever able to come up with the ideas they have had.īut there is a radically different view, suggested by a hugely prescient quote from the 19th century American genius Ralph Waldo Emerson: Quite what genius might actually be is left a little vague. We are taught to admire the minds of those infinite, baffling but astonishing geniuses like Einstein, Tolstoy or Picasso.
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