Musings on Genius and Maturity

In freshman year of college, a friend of mine told me she was attracted to a guy because she viewed him through "the goggles of excellence."  What she meant was, he was a brilliant musician. She was a spectacular singer and songwriter herself, so I grasped in an instant what she'd find so attractive about unusual talent and dedication.

There's a vast and growing literature out there about excellence, genius and exceptionalism.  Most of it, from what I can tell, is total junk.  But then there's this article in the New York Times, and it redeems the genre (or maybe is the exception that proves the rule.)

After years of interviewing people, it's easy for me to spot people who were labeled as gifted children.  They are articulate, emphatic, professionally fortunate.  Because of this, and because they are used to relating to adults intellectually from an early age, they are often mistaken for being more mature than they actually are.

But this assumed maturity is not the real thing; and Andrew Solomon makes a beautiful study of that point in his article.  He points out that child musical prodigies can often bring a shocking emotional intensity to their performances, but if their fantasies are not replaced eventually with experience, their performances over time grow stale.  Intellect, like everything else, requires fresh air to grow and expand.

On a practical level, extremely gifted children live in their own beautiful but isolated worlds.  I have been shocked, sometimes, at how the most brilliant people I've known have also been emotionally immature, surprisingly so for their age.  I can't help but agree with Solomon that this immaturity can obscure and eventually surpass early intelligence.  At the very least, it can lead to an unhappy and dissatisfied life. (Particularly, it seems, where intimate relationships are concerned.)

Solomon quotes the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who apparently once said, "Maturity, in music and in life, has to be earned by living."

What's sadder - and what Solomon's article brings out - is that society fails to understand or acknowledge the emotional needs and disadvantages of these children, precisely because they show a mental capacity that can frighten or bewilder even the most ardent well-wisher.  A quick listen to Leonard Bernstein's lectures at Harvard - stunning, bewildering in their scope - demonstrates what I'm talking about.  How many people, after listening to Bernstein's lectures, would feel comfortable addressing him as an equal?  How many people would argue with him, and even if they did, how many would do so in language he would understand or acknowledge?  (I'm picking Bernstein out of a lineup because he displays the superficial traits that I'm talking about.  I have no idea what his emotional state was.)

People who are extraordinary in some ways are still very ordinary in others.  This concept is easier to accept in theory than in practice.

Of course, there's a difference between a prodigy and an extremely brilliant child. (And some people remain lifelong jerks despite ample opportunities to evolve.)  Solomon says in his article that most child prodigies require the assistance of friends and relatives in order to excel.  "A prodigy is a group effort," he says, and I've said before that genius is a collective enterprise.  If that's the case, then perhaps we should reform the expectations of exceptionally talented people, as well as our understanding of them.