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swordwhale
Tol Eressea
Jan 22 2015, 7:24pm
Post #1 of 3
(179 views)
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Tolkien, Lewis and the lone genius myth
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listening to this on NPR...
"Joshua Wolf Shenk doesn't believe in the myth of the lone genius. "What has one person ever done alone?" he asks NPR's Robert Siegel."
Tolkien and Lewis get mentioned significantly.
http://www.npr.org/2014/07/24/334903925/when-it-comes-to-creativity-are-two-heads-better-than-one
"Judge me by my size, would you?" Max the Hobbit Husky.
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Ethel Duath
Half-elven
Jan 23 2015, 3:17am
Post #2 of 3
(112 views)
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I certainly do think that Tolkien and Lewis would not have written what they did, or been who they were without each other.
However, I don't necessarily like the seemingly absolute conclusions the author has reached here.
Here's part of my reply to my brother when he sent me an article about this awhile back from the NY Times. (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-genius.html?from=promo)
"Hmmm. Well, food for thought.
I certainly believe in collaboration, but I'm not sure why that means individual genius-folks (genii? geniuses? ) don't exist and don't do an awful lot independently? I just think there's maybe too much of an effort here to discredit that, instead of (very correctly) demonstrating that collaboration will often get you farther than isolation, although as an introvert, I can tell you that I do some of my best thinking by myself, and the presence of others can interrupt my thought process in certain kinds of things. And then with other types of work, collaboration is much better. I don't think we have to eliminate one to bolster the other.
I do agree that the cult of the individual has often been overdone, and no genius could reach their full potential without input and collaboration. And it should be encouraged and studied and all.
My personal caveat is that individual time and thought alone should also be encouraged. When I was in school [K-12, not college], being alone and thinking and doing things independently was frowned upon and treated with suspicion by most if not all of my teachers, and most (but not all) of the other kids as well.
I also have personal experience with this subject, and since a piano teacher friend has had several students of the type I'm going to describe, it's not that isolated a phenomenon. I once taught a little violin student who came to me at age 7 having had a year or 2 of violin, and only a bit of piano instruction, who walked into my house like Mozart himself, took one look at a complicated piano piece I had out, and ignored me completely, while scanning it in complete concentration, hearing every part in his head, and then later during his lessons, playing violin and picking up skills instantly, where even my best students would take a year or more to learn the same skills--well, my hair was standing on end. It was as if he had played at an advanced high school level for 2 or 3 years before he came to me, instead of being a little kid with a couple of years of beginning Suzuki training. He sucked in his environment and would process it in his head, with very little input from me or anyone else (you could watch him doing it. After I would give some brief instruction, his folks and I would just sit and watch while his eyes would get a far-away but still concentrated look, he'd nod and shake his head around a bit as if sorting information, and then suddenly he was doing vibrato or shifting into 4rth pos. never having done so before). It was like working with a child who had Toscanini and Maude Powell for parents. He was far too little to collaborate (emotionally, he was a very typical little boy of his age), and being home-schooled, he had no children to play with until later that year when they very sensibly went out deliberately and got him some. [They were terrific parents in every way, but were not musicians, and so had no input in that way. They moved away, so I have no idea what happened later]
So, I guess I would say that there certainly are people that are geniuses. They do things on their own, without much help, that defy logic. Give them collaboration and they will do greater things, but they still have something completely resident in themselves that produces far beyond what we can normally imagine. "
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swordwhale
Tol Eressea
Jan 23 2015, 4:04am
Post #3 of 3
(122 views)
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that kid....
one of those geniuses who has an inherent gift...
"Judge me by my size, would you?" Max the Hobbit Husky.
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