Authors: Eric Weiner
In 1620, Drebbel completed what he expected to be his greatest invention: a fully functioning submarine. It could hold twelve sailors, who steered the vessel with oars and could stay underwater for long periods, thanks to the pure oxygen Drebbel had bottled and fitted on board. The submarine, successfully tested in the Thames, flopped. It was seen as a curiosity, not a useful innovation. Drebbel’s reputation nose-dived. Broke,
he spent his later years running a pub. Today, his name hardly merits a mention in the history books. Innovation that doesn’t resonate is no innovation at all. Genius, like so much else in life, is all about timing.
Every city has at least one porthole to the past. For Hangzhou, it is Xi Hu, or West Lake, as cherished today as it was in the twelfth century. Before I arrived, Chinese friends raved about the lake, speaking of it in reverential tones, as if it were some sort of celebrity or deity. Over the centuries, some twenty-five thousand poems have been written about the lake. Love songs, all of them. Even Richard Nixon, no romantic he, was smitten. “Beautiful lake, shabby city,” he said when he visited Hangzhou in 1972, an observation that, with China just emerging from the Cultural Revolution, wasn’t far off the mark.
What connection, I wonder, does the lake have to the genius that was Hangzhou? Genius, as I said, is largely an urban phenomenon, yet creative people clearly derive inspiration from nature. That’s why great cities are never fully divorced from the natural world. They always retain visitation rights. New York’s Central Park. Vienna’s Wienerwald. Tokyo’s Imperial Gardens. A city completely detached from nature is a dead place, and not a very creative one.
One of West Lake’s early fans was Marco Polo. The Italian explorer visited Hangzhou in the thirteenth century and was clearly enamored—of the lake and of the city. In his diary, later published as
The Travels of Marco Polo
, he devotes some two dozen pages to the wonders of Hangzhou, “without doubt the finest and most splendid in the world.” Hangzhou’s population was at least 1 million (some estimates place it as high as 2.5 million), making it by far the largest city in the world, and making Marco Polo’s beloved Venice, with a population of fifty thousand, look like a hamlet. Indeed, Polo had a difficult time convincing skeptical Europeans that Hangzhou was real and not the result of an overactive imagination.
Polo was a keen observer of everyday life, and he devotes a fair amount of ink lauding the residents’ good hygiene. “It is their custom [to bathe] every day, and they will not sit down to a meal without first washing.”
Okay, perhaps that is not impressive by modern standards, but for Polo, coming from ragged, diseased Europe, this was the zenith of clean living.
Reading Polo’s unfailingly glowing descriptions, though, I can’t help but wonder if he had perhaps overindulged in Hangzhou’s famous rice wine. How else to explain his sightings of giant pears, “weighing ten pounds apiece,” or a hundred-foot-long “hairy fish”?
Keep in mind that Polo was far from home, traveling during an era long ago, before Skype. He was homesick. Then, just when he must have resigned himself to that particular kind of sadness, he comes across a beautiful city on a lake, dotted with canals that people used like streets. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Here was a city just like Venice. Here was home.
Much about Hangzhou enthralled Polo, but nothing snared his attention like the women. “Very delicate and angelic things,” he writes, noting that they possessed equal parts beauty and cunning. “These ladies are highly proficient and accomplished in the uses of endearments and caresses, with words suited and adapted to every sort of person, so that foreigners who have once enjoyed them remain utterly beside themselves and so captivated by their sweetness and charm that they can never forget them.”
I read that and get the distinct impression Polo is speaking from personal experience. Was he familiar with the sexual peccadilloes of the time? Did he know that male masturbation was discouraged but female masturbation strongly encouraged, or that, as historian (and Polo biographer) Laurence Bergreen tells us, “sex toys designed to aid women in reaching orgasm were common [in Hangzhou] and were widely discussed and written about in popular sex manuals”?
No manual was more popular than the classic
The Biography of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty.
It was already a thousand years old when Polo arrived in China, but—like
The Joy of Sex—
never went out of fashion. It contains explicit descriptions of sexual positions such as the Turning Dragon, the Fluttering Phoenix, and the intriguing, possibly painful, Overlapping Fish Scales. I’ll leave any further details to your imagination;
suffice it to say that the creative spirit of Hangzhou clearly extended deep into the bedroom.
Polo is less complimentary about the men of Hangzhou, whom he regards as almost eunuchlike and “being so cosseted and pampered by their kings . . . have no skill in handling arms and do not keep any in their house.” Well, Marco, gunslinging wasn’t necessary. Hangzhou, like Athens under Pericles, was largely at peace during its golden age.
For both cities, though, peace came at a price—blood in the case of Athens, treasure in the case of Hangzhou. The Chinese emperors knew they couldn’t fend off their powerful enemies militarily, so they bought them off with tribute. Peace was expensive, and therefore valued.
Peacetime should not be confused with dull times. Old Hangzhou was anything but boring. Places of genius never are, as Graham Greene pointed out in his cutting comment about Switzerland: “They had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!” (Actually, not even that. The cuckoo clock is a German invention.)
In his study of golden ages, Dean Simonton found that places riddled with political intrigue, turmoil, and uncertainty thrived creatively. “It is as if the conflicts that plague the political world encourage young developing minds to consider more radical worldviews,” he says. That old Chinese expression “May you live in interesting times” applies to the creative world as well as the political one.
I wake to dark skies and a steady drizzle. I shower, toss the goldfish a smile, then head to the lobby, where I meet Dana. Like many Chinese, she has adopted an anglicized name, ostensibly for the benefit of us foreigners, but I think the Chinese do it for themselves, lest they have to listen to us mangle their names.
I find Dana sitting in a swivel chair beneath an Andy Warhol tomato soup can, looking stiff and out of place with her chunky glasses and sensible bob. I know Dana from previous trips to China, and I’m hoping she can once again help me bridge the great linguistic divide, and perhaps the temporal one, too.
We walk, and a curtain of silence quickly descends. Dana, unlike my gabby friends back home, only speaks when she has something to say. I fill the silence with small talk about the weather.
Crummy day, I say.
No, says Dana. The rain is not bad. In China, a good day is a rainy day. Rain means life.
Well, then, I think, as we splash through ankle-deep puddles, this must be a good day indeed.
I’ve been in Hangzhou for more than twenty-four hours now and haven’t seen the lake yet, Dana informs me, as if this constituted a felony. She insists we go there now, enticing me with the prospect of finding one of Hangzhou’s geniuses there, a poet-governor named Su Tungpo.
The lake does not disappoint. Surrounded on three sides by lush green mountains and specked with countless pagodas and temples, it exudes quiet beauty. After a few minutes, we come across a statue. Gold-plated and perfect in every regard, it towers over us. It’s Su Tungpo, governor of Hangzhou, poet, painter, travel writer, and engineer. Everyone in today’s Hangzhou knows him and loves him. All can recite his poems, recognize his paintings at a glance. There’s even a dish named after him, a rich pork concoction smothered in gravy, a delicious irony considering that Su was a vegetarian.
“Many of us are slaves of life, I think,” says Dana as we gaze at the statue. “But Su understood life and how to enjoy it.”
We cross a small bridge—one of those picture-perfect, little Chinese bridges that I’ve seen in paintings and Jackie Chan movies but didn’t know still exist—and step inside a small museum devoted to the Man. Inside, some of Su’s poems are on display, his distinctive calligraphy spread across a few dozen white scrolls, remarkably well preserved. Sometimes he dispensed with the paper and scribbled his poems on trees, rocks, or walls. Such was the spontaneous, almost reckless, nature of his art, and of his times.
If block printing was the Internet of its age, poetry was the Twitter. People communicated in short missives that packed a lot of meaning into only a few characters. Unlike in previous eras, when poetry was limited
to divine subjects, Song-era poetry, like today’s social media, tackled every topic under the sun, from iron mines to body lice. In Hangzhou, as in Athens, the arts didn’t stand apart from everyday life.
It’s difficult to overestimate the role that poetry in particular played at the time. People could pay for wine and tea with copies of the most celebrated poems of the day. Regular competitions were held. Even children got involved, such as the seven-year-old prodigy who was summoned to the royal court and asked to compose this poem about the departure of her brothers.
In the pavilion of separation, the leaves suddenly blew away.
On the road of farewell, the clouds lifted all of a sudden.
Ah! How I regret that men are not like wild geese
Who go on their way together.
Not bad for a seven-year-old. Or a forty-seven-year-old, come to think of it. As I said, everyone wrote poems, but no one wrote more sublimely than Su. One poem in particular, “Traveling at Night and Looking at the Stars,” catches my eye:
Peer at things up close and you may learn their true form,
but guessed at from afar, they seem like something else.
Vastness such as this is beyond comprehension—
all I can do is sigh in endless wonder.
That is a recurring theme in his work, this sense of wonder, which Su, like the Greeks, believed lies at the heart of all scientific inquiry, of life itself. A deep and abiding sense of awe is an indispensable aspect of genius. Many of the greatest physicists—Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Hans Bethe—say they found inspiration not in the laboratory but by gazing at the towering Alps or, like Su, a star-filled sky. They all possessed what Max Weber called “the capacity to be amazed.” Every genius, no matter his field, has this capacity and knows that, as British philosopher Alan Watts observed, a sense of wonder “distinguishes men
from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.”
Su was also, as I said, a painter, and some of his evocative, impressionistic work is on display here. His method was unorthodox. With a few excited, rapid splashes of ink, he would complete a painting in minutes. “He either succeeds or fails,” explains his biographer, “and if he fails, he crumples up the paper, rolls it into a ball, throws it into the wastebasket, and starts all over again.”
When art historians use ultraviolet fluorescence technology to examine masterpieces, of any age, they often find layers of previous efforts hidden under the canvas. Geniuses possess a steely determination, a willingness to start over again and again that, while it doesn’t fit our Romantic notion of effortless creation, is crucial nonetheless. What distinguishes the genius from the also-ran is not necessarily how many times she succeeds but how many times she starts over.
Music psychologist Gary McPherson conducted a revealing study in which he asked children how long they planned on playing their instruments. He then tallied how much they practiced and evaluated how well they played. He found that the single biggest determinant of their performance was not how much they practiced, or any innate ability, but simply their degree of long-term commitment. Those in it for the long haul played better than those who were not,
even if the short-termers practiced more than the others.
If the long-term committed practiced a lot, they improved
400 percent
more than the short-term committed.
I’m impressed with Su’s commitment, and with the sheer number of his paintings. There must be several dozen on display here. “This is nothing,” says Dana, and she’s right. Some twenty-four hundred of his poems have been preserved as well as countless paintings. Here he shares common ground with the Greeks, and indeed with most geniuses throughout the ages: they were extremely prolific. Bach composed on average twenty pages per day. Picasso produced more than twenty thousand works during his career, Freud some 330 publications. (Van Gogh, in a single man, housed the two traits common to many geniuses, industriousness and insanity. He continued to work up until the day he shot himself.)
In addition to being a poet and a painter, Su was a much-beloved governor
and an accomplished engineer. His best-known project was a causeway that traversed West Lake and still does today. Su was a Renaissance man three hundred years before the Renaissance.
As Dana and I step out of the museum, to a brightening sky, I find myself wondering why there aren’t more people like that today. Why must we sequester our ambitions? I answer my own question by imagining what would happen if a polymath like Su walked onto a modern college campus.
Is it literature that you’re interested in, Mr. Su? Then please see the School of Humanities. Oh, you’re a painter? Please drop by the Department of Fine Arts. What’s that? It’s engineering that piques your interest? We have an excellent school for that, too.
But I want to do it all.
I’m sorry, Mr. Su. We can’t help you there. Please return when you’ve clarified your career objectives. Meanwhile, if you like, I can direct you to Mental Health Services.