Authors: Eric Weiner
“Easy,” says Alex as we order our third round, or maybe it’s our fourth. “A small nation has to grow big balls.”
With those few, colorful words, Alex sums up an entire philosophy of the small. Small places are more intimate than larger ones. Small places, out of necessity, are more likely to direct their eyes outward and are therefore more likely to accumulate the varied stimuli that, research shows, make us more creative. Small places are more likely to ask questions, and questions are the building blocks of genius. Small places try harder.
Small places are also riddled with doubt. This is important. We tend to associate genius with unbridled self-confidence and certainty.
We assume that geniuses know what they are doing. They do not. As Einstein said, “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research.”
No one exposes this lie more mercilessly than the Scots. They were uncertain about everything, from the worth of their indigenous language, a rascally tongue called Scots, to the fate of their very nation. This endemic doubt, rather than paralyze, empowered, and the Scots, writes historian Richard Sher, “demonstrated their own worth to themselves and others.” That’s the way doubt works. It either paralyzes or emboldens. Nothing in between.
I ask about Scottish dourness and the distinct gloominess I’ve detected, both in eighteenth-century Scotland and still today. One day, at the National Library, I saw people queuing to hear a lecture. What was it? Perhaps a local poet reading her collection of inspirational poems, or a professor cataloging Scottish accomplishments? Only when I squeezed past the crowds did I see the poster announcing that the library was pleased to present “Painful Tales: Death and Disease in the British Raj.”
As I said, dark. What, I ask Alex, is going on?
“On the one hand,” says Alex, between sips, “it’s true. We Scots are dark, cruel, and self-abasing.” He pauses for a long time, letting me soak up the enormity of that statement, marvel at how it packs so much negativity into such little space.
I’m waiting for the other hand. You can’t count on much in this dark, cruel, and self-abasing world, but, in my experience, if there is one hand, then you can count on another to shortly be forthcoming. Yet none is. Alex just stares at his lager, as if hypnotized. I fear he may have dozed off and am not sure what to do.
“On the other hand . . . ,” he says finally. I audibly exhale. “On the other hand, we also have a stubborn optimism, a boldness of spirit.” Despite all their outward grimness and fatalism, the Scots believe in “man’s innate quality of sympathy and benevolence,” as one historian put it. All geniuses, I think, share this belief, at least in some form. To create something worthwhile you must possess a grudging faith that your creation will find an appreciative audience. To create is to have faith not only in the
moment but in moments yet to come. That’s why you don’t hear about many nihilists producing creative works.
The Walrus tallies our tab, and Alex and I stumble onto Jamaica Street. The air feels good. I feel good. More than that, I detect a bud of optimism sprouting inside me. It’s an unusual sensation, one that, like most unusual sensations, I first mistake for indigestion. But the facts are accumulating faster than our bar tab had. I, too, suffer from bouts of self-doubt and uncertainty. I, too, am a divided self and maintain a sometimes tenuous relationship with reality. Ignorance? I’ve got boatloads. As Alex and I say good-bye, I happily conclude that I might, just might, have the makings of genius.
As I shimmy back to my hotel, though, doubt creeps into my mind.
“Aha, doubt—another sign of genius!” says one of my divided selves.
“No,” says my other self, as I grope for my room key. “You are no genius.”
“Perhaps, but I might be Scottish,” my unified self decides, and as far as we’re concerned, that’s nearly as good.
The more I dig, the more I discover that Alex is right: the Scots possessed substantial testicular mass. They weren’t satisfied wrestling with the small questions. No, they dove headfirst into the biggest mysteries of their day, of
any
day. Such as, how old is time?
Today, we know (or at least we’re pretty sure we know) that the earth is 4.6 billion years old. But in the eighteenth century, conventional wisdom held that the earth was no more than six thousand years old because, well, that’s what the Bible said, and absent any compelling evidence to the contrary, that’s what people believed.
Most people at least. A soft-spoken polymath named James Hutton wasn’t so sure. He began to ask questions, amass evidence. Eventually, with more than a little help from some friends, Hutton synthesized his various findings into a tome ambitiously titled
Theory of the Earth
and presented it to his largely skeptical colleagues at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. That skepticism would erode, during and after Hutton’s lifetime, and eventually his conclusion that the earth was much, much older
than six thousand years would be accepted by the scientific community. A young biologist named Charles Darwin read Hutton’s work, channeled through another geologist named Charles Lyell, while on board the HMS
Beagle
, en route to the Galápagos Islands. Darwin’s ideas about evolution were profoundly affected by Hutton’s findings, and some historians believe that without Hutton there would have been no Darwin.
Despite his stellar achievements, Hutton is a hard man to track down, even in his native Edinburgh. No Royal Mile statue for old James. No museum erected in his honor, no pub named after him. I finally find him sulking on the edge of town. It’s called the James Hutton Memorial Garden, but it looks more like a garbage dump. The ground is littered with empty cigarette cartons, tuna tins, candy wrappers. Auditory pollution, too: the thump of jackhammers and the whoosh of cars from a nearby road. Hutton doesn’t get many visitors. On this day it’s just me and two chain-smoking teenagers, using the great geologist’s garden as an ashtray.
Fortunately, the history books have been kinder to Hutton, and in those pages I find a more complete, and sympathetic, portrait of the man who found time. In at least one important aspect, Hutton’s childhood resembled that of many geniuses: he lost a parent at a young age. Hutton was only an infant when his father, a merchant, died. David Hume also lost his father as an infant; Adam Smith’s father died before Adam was born. I’m beginning to suspect that Sartre may have been right when he quipped that the best gift a father can give a son is to die young.
With his cocked hat and “unaffected simplicity,” Hutton was a well-known figure in town. Here is another trait common to geniuses: an utter and complete lack of self-consciousness. Hutton simply didn’t care what others thought of him. Few geniuses do. Think of Socrates’s nose. Or Einstein’s hair. That is not the hair of someone who devoted much of his considerable gray matter to personal grooming. And who can blame him? He didn’t want to pay the opportunity cost. Time spent combing your hair is time not spent contemplating the speed of light.
Hutton was a bit of a lost soul. A farmer turned physician turned lawyer, he enjoyed nothing more than digging in the mud and collecting rocks. Those rocks, Hutton believed, contained important clues about the
past. The rocks could talk. Yes, geology was Hutton’s true passion. There was one slight problem, though: geology didn’t exist yet.
So James Hutton did what many geniuses do: he invented a category. “Domain creation” it’s called, and it is perhaps the highest form of genius. It’s one thing to compose beautiful music; it’s another to invent a new musical language, as Gustav Mahler did, or the discipline of evolutionary biology, as Darwin did.
Hutton’s genius began with simple observation. He took regular trips to the Scottish Highlands to observe firsthand how subterranean heat created granite. Closer to home, he went on long walks on Arthur’s Seat, the mountain on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
I walk the short distance there now. Even with my novice eyes, I can see why Hutton was drawn to it. The mountain is a geological wonderland. Formed 350 million years ago by a volcanic eruption, it has since undergone earthquakes and flooding, was submerged under an ancient sea, and was finally subsumed by an ice-age glacier.
Hutton took meticulous records of altitude and temperature. Arthur’s Seat was Hutton’s laboratory, one that “offered daily lessons for the philosopher,” says Jack Repcheck in his excellent biography of Hutton.
Most of us look. The genius sees. Hutton noted when something wasn’t quite right, didn’t fit. Rather than dismiss such incongruities or explain them away, he investigated further. He asked questions. Why, for instance, was one layer of rocks, called Salisbury Crags, darker than others in the area? What were fish fossils doing on the summit of a mountain?
Hutton couldn’t let these inconsistencies just be. They nagged at him, haunted him. Clearly, he was under the spell of the Zeigarnik effect.
Bluma Zeigarnik was a Russian psychologist. She was at a restaurant one day and noticed how the waiters kept perfect track of orders, but as soon as the plates hit the table, they “deleted” the information. She conducted a series of experiments and determined that we recall information associated with incomplete tasks much more readily than other types of information. Something about an unsolved problem boosts our memory and sharpens our thinking.
Geniuses, I suspect, are more susceptible to the Zeigarnik effect than
the rest of us. When faced with an unsolved problem, they persist and can’t rest until it is solved. This persistence explains more about creative genius than those apocryphal “aha moments.” Asked how he discovered the law of gravitation, Isaac Newton made no mention of falling apples and instead replied, “By thinking on it continually.”
James Hutton had lots of time to think. Like many of Edinburgh’s geniuses, he was a lifelong bachelor. Hutton’s world consisted of his rocks and his friends. The rocks provided the raw material he needed to formulate his theories; the friends provided the guidance he needed to articulate those theories.
The latter proved crucial, for eloquence was not among James Hutton’s considerable talents. He was a terrible writer, simply awful. Hutton needed help.
Enter John Playfair, Hutton’s close friend, a mathematician with a feel for language. He revived Hutton’s parched prose, rendering his papers readable, compelling even.
Articulation of an idea, especially an idea as revolutionary as Hutton’s, matters more than we think. It is one thing to be right and quite another to convince others that you are right. You can have all the brilliant ideas in the world, but if no one can understand them, what good are they? The role that Hutton’s friend played was more than mere public relations though. The word
articulation
is derived from a root meaning “joining” or “joint.” To articulate an idea is to cement it, to cocreate it. The conception of an idea cannot be separated from the voicing of it.
Rarely, though, are both skill sets found in the same person. Thus, the need for what I call compensatory genius. Compensatory genius is when one brilliant mind makes up for the shortcoming of another brilliant one. Compensatory genius can take many forms. Sometimes, as with Hutton and Playfair, one genius actively compensates for the deficiencies of another. At other times, one genius reacts to the work of another. Aristotle responding to Plato, Goethe to Kant, Beethoven to Mozart.
Sometimes compensatory genius takes the form of a support group for those charting unknown intellectual and artistic waters. The French impressionists held weekly meetings, outdoor painting sessions, and other
informal gatherings, all aimed at bolstering their spirits in the face of the regular rejection they experienced at the hands of the old guard. Without this compensatory genius, the movement might not have survived.
Sometimes compensatory genius is invisible. Consider the steam engine. Scotland’s best-known invention is something of a lie. James Watt didn’t invent the steam engine, as is widely believed. He
did
make major improvements to a machine invented fifty years earlier by Thomas Newcomen, transforming it into something more practical. In a way, they
both
invented the steam engine. Paul Valéry, the French poet and essayist, claimed, “It takes two to invent anything.” One person constructs a rough idea and a second refines it, compensates for its inadequacies and inconsistencies.
It’s getting late. The alleged sunlight is beginning to fade. I trundle down Arthur’s Seat, taking in the view of Edinburgh below, not that different from what James Hutton would have seen all those years ago. Back at the memorial garden, the loitering teenagers now gone, I notice a quote, attributed to Hutton, engraved on a small slate of marble:
WE FIND NO VESTIGE OF A BEGINNING—NO PROSPECT OF AN END
. These few short words sum up his life’s work, and perhaps all of human creativity.
I can’t help but wonder if Hutton’s rare burst of eloquence in reality flowed from the pen of his compensating friend, John Playfair. As I turn onto the street that leads back to my hotel, the sky now a soft crimson, I realize I will likely never know the answer. That’s okay. We needn’t know the source of a bright light to appreciate its radiance.
Edinburgh, it’s been said, is a city built on surprise, a place that reveals its secrets grudgingly, and only to those who work at it. Edinburgh’s topography, with its “theatre tricks in the way of scenery,” as Robert Louis Stevenson put it, stokes this sense of surprise and its close cousin wonder. “You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back window of a grimy tenement in a lane—and behold! you are face to face with distant and bright prospects,” he wrote.
Stevenson knew more than most that creativity is largely an act of
discovery. To dis-cover is to uncover, to unveil and shine a light on what lies beneath. When that happens, you surprise not only others, but yourself. I’m thinking of the writer who stumbles across a passage, marveling at its poetic beauty, its simple eloquence, before realizing that she is staring at her own words, written years ago. When the composer Joseph Haydn heard his masterpiece
The Creation
performed for the first time, he was dumbstruck. “I have not written this,” he said, tears welling in his eyes.