The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (3 page)

Typically, these are not the sort of questions we ask about creative genius. We’ve framed the discussion almost exclusively in terms of something that happens “inside of us.” If that were true, though, these genius clusters wouldn’t exist. And if creativity were solely an interior process, psychologists would by now have identified a universal “creative personality.” They have not, and I doubt they ever will. Geniuses can be sullen introverts such as Michelangelo or happy extroverts such as Titian.

Like Galton, we’ve been sticking pins in all the wrong places, asking the wrong questions. Rather than asking “What is creativity?” a better question is “
Where
is creativity?” I’m not speaking of trendy metropolises with lots of sushi restaurants and theater. Those are the fruits of a creative city, not its source. I’m not speaking of free food and beanbag chairs but, rather, the underlying conditions, often unexpected, that make a golden age shine. In a word, I’m speaking of culture.

Culture is more than what the dictionary tells us: “a set of shared attitudes, values and goals.” Culture is the enormous yet invisible ocean in
which we swim. Or, to put it in modern, digital terms, culture is a shared IT network. Yes, it’s temperamental and crashes too often for our liking, but without it we can’t communicate with one another or accomplish much of anything. Only now, though, are we beginning to fully understand the connection between the cultural milieu and our most creative ideas. Simonton and a handful of other social scientists have quietly been developing a new theory of creativity, one that aims to chart the circumstances of genius.

I’ve decided to explore this geography of genius, to put flesh and blood on Simonton’s numbers. I realize this won’t be easy, given that these genius clusters existed not only in a certain place but at a certain time, and that time is not now. I fully acknowledge that, say, Athens of today is not the Athens of Socrates’s day. Still, I’m hoping that something of the spirit, of the genius loci, remains.

I tell Simonton of my plans and he nods his approval. As I stand up to leave, though, he throws a name at me: Alphonse de Candolle.

“Never heard of him.”

“Precisely,” says Simonton. Candolle, he explains, was a Swiss botanist, a contemporary of Galton’s. He thought Galton was dead wrong about genius being hereditary and, in 1873, wrote a book saying as much. Candolle laid out a thorough and convincing argument that environment, not genetics, determines genius. Unlike Galton, he even accounted for his own cultural biases. He would only classify, say, a Swiss scientist as a genius if scientists outside Switzerland concurred. His book
Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siècles
was “one of the greatest books ever written on genius,” Simonton says.

It sank without a trace. The world did not want to hear what Candolle had to say.

“Just a friendly warning,” says Simonton, as I say good-bye, then make my way across the sleepy California campus to a bar where I order a stiff drink and ponder the task ahead.

I’ve selected six historic places of genius, as well as one current one. Some are huge metropolises, such as Vienna of 1900; others, such as Renaissance Florence, are tiny by modern standards. Some, such as ancient
Athens, are well-known; others such as nineteenth-century Calcutta, less so. Each of these places, though, represented an apex of human achievement.

Nearly all are cities. We may be inspired by nature—a walk in the woods, the sound of a waterfall—but something about an urban setting is especially conducive to creativity. If it takes a village to raise a child, as the African proverb goes, it takes a city to raise a genius.

As I contemplate the quixotic journey that lies ahead, questions flood my mind. Do these genius clusters come in one flavor or many? Clearly, something was in the air in these places, but was it the same something or different somethings? And once the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, had soured, did the genius of the place evaporate completely, or do trace elements remain?

One question, though, elbows its way to the front of the queue, and it is not a how or a what but a why. Why embark on this journey? The simple answer is that it represents a natural extension of a career spent charting mankind’s greatest aspirations, be it the pursuit of happiness or the quest for spiritual fulfillment. Am I hoping that some of the genius I encounter will rub off on me? Sure, but I’m middle-aged, and any hopes of my becoming the next Einstein or Leonardo have long since disappeared, along with my hair. But my daughter—nine years old and brimming with brightness and infinite possibility—is another story. There is still hope for her, and what parent doesn’t secretly wish that his or her child might become the next Darwin or Marie Curie? To this end, we tend to focus our energies on
them
—by imparting good study habits or exposing them to a buffet of intellectual possibilities, for instance.

Perhaps we worry about the genes we’ve passed on to them. In my case, that is not an issue. My daughter is adopted, from Kazakhstan, and therefore spared the curse of my highly neurotic gene pool. My wife and I are providing her nurture, not nature, and that, I believe, is what matters most.

Family has been called variously a clan, a tribe, “one of nature’s masterpieces” (George Santayana), “a haven in a heartless world” (Christopher Lasch). It is all of those things but it is also a microculture, one that
we shape more directly, and profoundly, than any other. Like all cultures, family culture can either cultivate creativity or squelch it.

This is a big responsibility, if you think about it, which is precisely why, up until now, I’ve avoided thinking about it. That is about to change. Creativity, like charity, begins at home. As I set out on my journey, one in which I will traverse continents and centuries, I vow to keep this important truth in mind.

ONE

GENIUS IS SIMPLE: ATHENS

THE LIGHT. MAYBE IT WAS the light.

The thought shimmies into my sleep-starved brain, strutting with the awkward bravado of a tweedy classicist on crack. Yes, I think, blinking away the hours of stale Boeing air, the light.

Most light doesn’t do much for me. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong. Preferable to darkness, sure, but strictly utilitarian. Not the light in Greece. Greek light is dynamic, alive. It dances across the landscape, flickering here, glowing there, constantly and subtly shifting in intensity and quality. Greek light is sharp and angular. It’s the sort of light that makes you pay attention, and as I would soon learn, paying attention is the first step on the road to genius. As I glance out my taxi window, shielding my eyes from the painfully bright morning sun, I can’t help but wonder: Have I found a piece of the Greek puzzle?

I hope so, for it is a daunting puzzle, one that has stumped historians and archaeologists, not to mention the Greeks themselves, for centuries. The question that nags is this: Why? Or, more precisely, why
here
? Why did this well-lit but otherwise unremarkable land give rise to a people
unlike any other the world had seen, a people, as the great classicist Humphrey Kitto put it, “not very numerous, not very powerful, not very organized, who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for”?

This incredible flourishing didn’t last long. Yes, “classical Greece” is officially considered a 186-year period, but the apex of that civilization, sandwiched between two wars, only lasted twenty-four years. In human history, that’s a lightning flash across the summer sky, the flicker of a votive candle, a tweet. Why so brief?

Ancient Greece
. As the taxi slows to a crawl (rush-hour traffic not being something the ancients had to contend with), I ponder those two words. They make me shrink, embarrassed by how much I don’t know, bored with the little I do. When I think of the Greeks—if I think of them at all—images of gray men joylessly pondering life’s imponderables spring to mind. What can they possibly do for me? I have bills to pay and e-mails to send and deadlines to meet. The ancient Greeks seem about as relevant to my life as the rings of Saturn, or trigonometry.

Not for the first or last time, I am wrong. The truth is, no ancient peoples are more alive, more relevant today, than the Greeks. We are all a little bit Greek, whether we know it or not. If you’ve ever voted or served on a jury or watched a movie or read a novel or sat around with a group of friends drinking wine and talking about anything from last night’s football game to the nature of truth, you can thank the Greeks. If you’ve ever had a rational thought or asked
Why?
or gazed at the night sky in silent wonder, then you have had a Greek moment. If you’ve ever spoken English, you can thank the Greeks. So many of our words sprang from their rich language that a Greek prime minister once gave an entire speech, in English, using only Greek-derived words. Yes, the Greeks brought us democracy, science, and philosophy, but we can also thank (or curse) them for written contracts, silver and bronze coins, taxes, writing, schools, commercial loans, technical handbooks, large sailing ships, shared-risk investment, absentee landlordism. Nearly every part of our lives is inspired by the Greeks, including the very notion of inspiration. “We think and feel differently because of the Greeks,” concludes historian Edith Hamilton.

My taxi stops in front of a tired three-story building that, except for a small sign that says
TONY’S HOTEL
, is indistinguishable from all the other tired three-story buildings. I step into the alleged lobby, a white-tiled room that looks more like someone’s basement, piled high with rickety chairs, broken coffee machines—possessions you no longer need but, out of sentimentality or inertia, can’t bear to part with. Like Greece itself, Tony’s Hotel has seen better days.

So has Tony. The Greek sun has etched deep lines on his face; the Greek cuisine has inflated his gut to monumental proportions. Tony is all rough edges and sweetness, a throwback to an older, drachma Greece. Less euro; more endearing. Like many Greeks, Tony is a natural performer. He speaks a little more loudly than necessary and swings his arms in large, theatrical motions, no matter how mundane the topic at hand. It’s as if he’s auditioning for
Greek Idol
. All the time.

I plop down on my bed and thumb through the small library of books I’ve packed, a whimsical collection curated from the vast ocean of ink that ancient Greece has spawned. My eyes are drawn to a quirky, little volume called
Daily Life in Athens at the Time of Pericles.
It’s a pleasing antidote to the usual history, which is written from a mountaintop and is as dry as a desert. Historians typically track wars and upheavals and sweeping ideological movements like so many weather systems. Most of us, though, don’t experience weather that way. We experience it down here, not as a massive low-pressure system but as sheets of rain that slicken our hair, a crack of thunder that rattles our insides, a Mediterranean sun that warms our face. And so it is with history. The story of the world is not the story of coups and revolutions. It is the story of lost keys and burnt coffee and a sleeping child in your arms. History is the untallied sum of a million everyday moments.

Within this quotidian stew genius quietly simmers. Sigmund Freud nibbling on his favorite sponge cake at Vienna’s Café Landtmann. Einstein staring out the window of the Swiss patent office in Berne. Leonardo da Vinci wiping the sweat from his forehead at a hot and dusty Florentine workshop. Yes, these geniuses thought big, world-changing thoughts, but they did so in small spaces. Down here. All genius, like all politics, is local.

From this new, terrestrial vantage point, I learn much about the ancient Greeks. I learn that they loved to dance and wonder what exactly transpired during such numbers as “Stealing the Meat” and “The Itch.” I learn that, before exercising, young men would swathe their bodies with olive oil, and that “the manly smell of olive oil in the
gymnasium
was considered sweeter than perfume.” I learn that the Greeks wore no underwear, that a unibrow was considered a mark of beauty, that they enjoyed grasshoppers both as pets and as appetizers. I learn a lot, but besides these peccadilloes, I learn
what
the Greeks produced, not
how
they produced it, and it is the how that I am determined to nail down.

But first, I need something the ancient Greeks didn’t have: coffee. The nectar of the gods shouldn’t be imbibed just anywhere, though. Location matters.

For me, cafés are a kind of second home, a prime example of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a “great good place.” The food and drink are irrelevant, or nearly so. What matters is the atmosphere—not the tablecloths or the furniture but a more intangible ambience, one that encourages guilt-free lingering and strikes just the right balance of background din and contemplative silence.

I don’t know about the ancients, but twenty-first-century Greeks are not exactly early risers. At 8:00 a.m. I have the streets to myself, save the occasional storekeeper coaxing the sleep from his eyes, and a handful of policemen outfitted in full RoboCop riot gear—a reminder that, like its ancient self, modern Athens is a city on edge.