The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (22 page)

“No. You’re looking at a prison. It may not look like it, but that’s what Florence is. A very beautiful prison.”

Left unsaid, floating in the soft spring air, was the unavoidable conclusion: beautiful prisons are the cruelest of all.

Eugene and I are meeting one last time and have decided to indulge in a pizza. We order one with mozzarella, basil, and extra
sprezzatura.
As we’re diving in like famished animals, I realize I’ve forgotten to ask Eugene my time-travel question. If he could spend an hour talking to someone from Renaissance Florence, who would it be?

“Michelangelo,” he says without hesitation. “He was such a nut job.
He couldn’t do anything the normal way. That is one of the things I love about the guy. He was sort of a loose cannon.”

“You wouldn’t want to hang with Leonardo?”

“I’d like to go drinking with Leonardo. He was fun, a real dandy, but I’d love to sit and talk with Mike. I wouldn’t party with Mike. He’d be a downer. He’d probably want to punch me in the nose. He was not a very nice person. He was an interesting person.”

This makes me wonder, what if we reversed the time-travel experiment? What would Michelangelo say if he came back to the Florence of today?

“He’d say, ‘What the hell have you been doing for the past five hundred years? You’re making the same art as before.’ ” Eugene laughs, but of course he’s right. The Florentines long ago exhausted Kroeber’s “cultural configurations.” Their creativity cupboard is bare.

Before digging into another slice, I take a moment to ponder it, to assess it in a Florentine way. It is good, one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had, but why? Are the ingredients fresher? Perhaps. Is the chef more skilled? Maybe.

The secret, I realize, lies in the proportions. Just the right amount of mozzarella and tomato sauce and basil, no more and no less. Florence, in ways big and small, gets the proportions right, just as Athens did, and this, Eugene suggests between bites, explains not only the beauty of Florence but also the genius. It didn’t necessarily possess different ingredients from other places at the time, but it got the proportions right.

“You can’t just throw pineapple juice and coconut and rum together and expect to have a good piña colada,” says Eugene.

“Although you do need all of those things.”

“You do, but if something is a little bit off, it could come out all wrong. Look at genetics. If you are missing one little gene, that changes everything.” He’s right. The genes of humans and chimpanzees are 99 percent the same. Sometimes 1 percent makes all the difference.

What about the question I set out to answer? Did Florence have a Renaissance because it could afford one? Can money buy genius?

The answer is clearly yes. And no. Money, a certain amount anyway,
is indispensable to creativity. Starving people rarely produce great works of art or discover new scientific truths. Also, wealth gives you the chance to fail. Wealth gives you do-overs. That was certainly the case in Renaissance Florence. Failure—sometimes of the spectacular variety—occurred regularly. This did not dissuade people from taking risks; if anything, it encouraged more, as a new artist, or a new generation, aimed to get it
just right.
Like Athens and Hangzhou, Florence was a restless place. It never said, “Good enough.” The name Florence (Firenze in Italian) is derived from a word that means “to flower or bloom.” It is a verb, not a noun.

So, yes, Voltaire was right. Golden ages require wealth and freedom. But he overlooked a crucial third ingredient: uncertainty. What Thomas Jefferson said about the political world—“a little rebellion now and then is a good thing”—applies to the creative world as well. Tension, a degree of it at least, keeps us on our toes and tests our perseverance. Ghiberti completed the Baptistery doors over twenty-five years, a time marked by incredible political and financial upheavals. Yet his patrons never wavered in their support; they knew instinctively that these tensions would help, not hinder, the young artist. Nothing kills creativity like a sure thing.

Nor do the good times last, though. Sylvia Plath’s prophetic statement—“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end”—proved true for Florence as well. The city died the way it lived: at the hands of the Almighty Florin. Its good materialism devolved into crass consumerism. Meanwhile, to pay for Saint Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo X, another Medici, proclaimed a special “indulgence.” Much of the money he raised vanished, and the ensuing outrage paved the way for the Reformation. A new world order soon took shape, and the creative energy that was centered in Florence shifted west and north, to a place that, in climate if not disposition, was about as different from the Tuscan city as it was possible to get.

A few months later, back home, I write to Eugene. I have some questions. The next week, I receive a reply. At first, everything seems normal. Wait. This is uncharacteristically brief for Eugene. Where is the rest of the e-mail? I scroll down.

White space.

White space.

Then this:

“Eric. This is Antonio, Eugene’s partner. I have horrible news. Eugene is dead.”

I stare at the screen for a long time, hoping it is some sort of mistake. A prank perhaps. It is not. Eugene died of a massive heart attack, in mid e-mail. The words that spring to mind are not those of Eugene but of another Florentine expat, E. M. Forster. “The sadness of the incomplete,” he once wrote. That phrase lodges itself into my stunned brain, along with the realization that I never had a chance to meet Eugene’s dog.

A few seconds later, my mind swerves again, and this time the words of György Faludy materialize. Asked why, at age seven, he decided to become a poet, Faludy replied, “Because I was afraid to die.”

All art is, at its core, a stab at immortality. We like to believe that geniuses, by dint of their creations, escape death. They do not. Every life, no matter how well and richly lived, is sadly incomplete. Even Leonardo’s. Even Michelangelo’s. And, certainly, my friend Eugene’s.

Genius offers only the illusion of immortality. Yet we reach for it anyway, the way a drowning man will reach for even the flimsiest of logs.

FOUR

GENIUS IS PRACTICAL: EDINBURGH

THE FIRST TIME I CATCH a glimpse of edinburgh Castle, sprouting from the basalt like some giant stone apparition, I am caught off guard. I’d seen pictures of it, read about it, and so I had modulated my expectations, discounted my reaction, in the language of Wall Street. Clearly, my calculations were off, for when I turn a corner and it suddenly materializes, towering over Edinburgh from one of the city’s many extinct volcanoes, I am stunned into an uncharacteristic silence.

Some places are like that. (The Taj Mahal comes to mind.) Having seen so many images of it, we’re certain that we are impervious to any charms it may possess. Yet when we lay eyes on it, in person, it quickens our pulse and humbles us.
Oh,
we say, once we can breathe again,
I didn’t know.

All of Edinburgh is like that. It surprises, and surprise, along with the attendant phenomena of wonder and awe, lies at the heart of all creative genius. No matter the amount of preparation and legwork, essential as they are, every creative breakthrough comes as something of a surprise, sometimes even to the creator.

Scotland’s capital city certainly surprised itself. Like all golden ages, Scotland’s moment in the sun was blindingly brief, not even fifty years, yet during that time tiny Edinburgh “ruled the Western intellect,” as contemporary author James Buchan put it. Scots made major contributions to—and in many cases invented—the fields of chemistry, geology, engineering, economics, sociology, philosophy, poetry, and painting. Adam Smith brought us the “invisible hand” of capitalism, and James Hutton a radical new understanding of our planet. Down the road, in Glasgow, James Watt was busy perfecting his steam engine, which would soon power the industrial revolution.

A little bit of Scotland is in all of us, whether we know it or not. If you’ve ever consulted a calendar or the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, you can thank the Scots. If you’ve ever flushed a toilet or used a refrigerator or rode a bicycle, thank the Scots. If you’ve ever received an injection from a hypodermic needle or had surgery and didn’t feel a thing, you can thank the Scots. Perhaps the greatest Scottish inventions, though, are the ones you can’t touch, for they occupy the realm of the mind. Big ideas such as empathy and morality and common sense. The Scots, though, never let these ideas float off into the heavens, untethered. They grounded them in the here and now. This was the Scottish brand of genius: the melding of deeply philosophical ideas with real-world applications. The bright lights who illuminated old Edinburgh weren’t interested in counting angels on a pinhead. They put those angels to work, and the result was the birth of everything from modern economics to sociology to historical fiction.

Good ideas are like toddlers. They can’t stay put for long. So the good ideas fermenting in Edinburgh soon reached distant shores. They found receptive audiences across the globe, especially in the American colonies. The Scots taught America’s founding fathers how to think about happiness and liberty and, more fundamentally, how to think for themselves. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were tutored by Scottish professors. Franklin, recalling a visit to Edinburgh, described it as “the
densest
happiness” he had ever experienced. Jefferson, writing in 1789, was equally effusive. “No place in the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh.”

Why this sudden burst of genius? It is a mystery that would stump even the great Sherlock Holmes, himself a product of Edinburgh. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attended the city’s renowned medical school. In truth, in the early eighteenth century, nobody saw this golden age coming. Scottish land was rough and stingy, as in Athens, the weather awful, the isolation formidable, the food inedible. Then there was the smell, which, also as in Athens, never failed to make an impression on visitors, such as an English surveyor named Edward Burt: “I was forced to hide my head between the sheets; for the Smell of the Filth, thrown out by the neighbors on the backside of the House, came pouring into the room.”

Auld Reekie, or Old Smokey, as the poet Robert Fergusson affectionately called Edinburgh, was a sad sack of a city. “Inconvenient, dirty, old-fashioned, alcoholic, quarrelsome, and poor,” says Buchan. The city’s inhabitants, a mere forty thousand, weren’t exactly a tolerant lot either. They were still hanging witches and blasphemers. As with Florence, Edinburgh suffered a series of catastrophes, some of them self-inflicted, some not. A failed attempt to establish a colony in the Isthmus of Panama depleted much of Scotland’s capital. (Why Scotland thought it needed a presence in Panama is beyond me.) Famine struck. Worse, so did the English. They swallowed up little Scotland. In a flash the country lost its king and parliament and army. Scotland had, in effect, been politically castrated.

That a creative flourishing followed soon after makes no sense. (And flies in the face of Danilevsky’s law, which, again, states that sovereignty is a prerequisite for creative flourishing.) In one of the many delicious ironies I encounter during my time in Edinburgh, none is tastier than this: The Scottish Enlightenment emphasized the importance of reason—indeed, it is sometimes called the Age of Reason—yet it seemingly defies reason. An explosion of genius that shouldn’t have happened,
couldn’t
have happened. And yet did.

Don’t look to the Scots, either, to explain themselves. All geniuses, no matter how brilliant, share the same blind spot: they are utterly clueless as to the source of their own brilliance. Einstein was at a loss to explain what made him Einstein. Freud, not prone to surrendering intellectually,
did just that when asked to explain creativity. “Before creativity, the psychoanalyst must lay down his arms,” he sighed.

Likewise, the greatest Scottish minds of the day, such as the philosopher David Hume, were at a loss to explain what made them so brilliant. “Is it not strange that, at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent Government, even the Presence of our chief Nobility, are unhappy . . . is it not strange, I say, that, in these Circumstances, we shou’d really be the People most distinguish’d for Literature in Europe?”

For centuries the source of Edinburgh’s golden age proved as elusive as the Loch Ness monster—inklings, a few sketchy sightings here and there, but nothing definitive. Recently, though, scholars have unearthed intriguing leads. The Scots, it turns out, have much to teach us on the nature of creative genius, and those lessons, in typical Scottish fashion, are wonderfully odd and unexpected.

As I walk Edinburgh’s streets and dive deep into its archives, I soon realize that the Scottish flavor of genius is different from any other I’ve sampled so far. Scottish genius is quirky and social and informal. Most of all, it is practical.

Practical genius? I admit it’s an odd concept. Isn’t genius cerebral and lofty, you might ask, the antithesis of practical? That’s what I thought, too, but the Scots changed my mind, and they did so the same way they’ve been changing minds for centuries: with equal doses of persistence and charm—and a few servings of single malt.