The Genius of the Season

So much is conveyed by a single phrase—a single word. Thus, celebrating "the birth of God” carries a different connotation from celebrating "the birth of a god.” Maybe the word "birth” says it all.

I was chatting at a party the other day with a friend who's writing a book about how dramatists and psychologists differ in their view of human nature. In brief, psychologists are interested in exploring causal links to the past to explain illness and bad habits, whereas dramatists mine the explosive and unpredictable creativity latent in every moment of history. When Hamlet says, 'To be or not to be," he's weighing his options, trying to make a decision. To a psychologist, such decisions have already been made for him by his DNA.

Both points of view have elements of merit, though I'd much rather go to the theater than read the latest issue of the  Neuroscience and Behavior Psychology Review; there's likely to be a lot more life and truth in it.

A friend of ours was visiting from Texas, as he does every Christmas. We've enjoyed listening to his adventures over the years, from the era when he was building an art handling business and fixing up his warehouse space on the wrong side of the tracks, to more recent times, when he's largely occupied with working on the retirement ranch he bought 90 minutes from Dallas. Things have worked out well for him, but as he told us the other day, "There was really no plan. I did what I had to do, step by step. It was that or go back to what I was doing before. And I couldn't do that."

Listening to him reflect on his life path, I was inclined to remark that if there hadn't been a plan, there had certainly been a direction. To my ears, everything Dave has done he described to us long ago as something he wanted to do ... though I don't recall hearing anything much about a ranch in the boondocks.

The next morning, feeling a little "thick," perhaps, from the whiskey we'd been drinking the night before, I pulled from the shelves a collection of essays by Henri Bergson called The Creative Mind: an Introduction to Metaphysics. Choosing from the table of contents an essay titled THE POSSIBLE AND THE REAL, this is what I read:

I should like to come back to a subject on which I have often spoken, the continuous creation of unfore­seeable novelty which seems to be going on in the uni­verse. As far as I am concerned, I feel I am experiencing it constantly. No matter how I try to imagine in detail what is going to happen to me, still how inadequate, how abstract and stilted is the thing I have imagined in comparison to what actually happens! The realization brings along with it an unforeseeable nothing which changes everything. For example, I am to be present at a gathering; I know what people I shall find there, around what table, in what order, to discuss what prob­lem. But let them come, be seated and chat as I expected, let them say what I was sure they would say: the whole gives me an impression at once novel and unique, as if it were but now designed at one original stroke by the hand of an artist.

Isn't Christmas a little like that? Predictable and slightly oppressive in its prospect, enriching and often delightful as it "comes to pass."

On the morning after, light comes to a blank blue sky, the temperature's below zero, football's on hold, and the refrigerator is full of leftovers glowing with the warmth of recent gatherings. 

My Greek is a little rusty, but as I recall, the prefix “gen-” carries a range of inference that spans race, type, line of descent, origin, creation, sexual relations, and reproduction. Just think of the modern equivalents: generation, genius, generator, gender, genuine, and genesis.

But that simple prefix, "gen," can also take us in a different direction. Alongside that series of concepts having to do with novelty, creativity, authenticity, and uniqueness, it also underlies concepts such as genus, genealogy, and general, that lump things together into groups on the basis of their type or ancestry. Today we hold no one in higher esteem than the “genius,” yet reserve our most withering derision for the merely “generic.” 

These two sides of the expression will never be reconciled--one looks back, the other ahead--but it would be a mistake to imagine that they’re entirely opposed to one another. For example, we meet up with both at every social gathering: the idiosyncrasies and the differences between family members that stimulate us (though they can also annoy us) and the veins of affection that run ever-deeper and constitute the reality (rather than merely the pedigree) of the clan.

Praise be to whoever cooked up a universe replete with such affinities, both elective and congenital. May we become ever more generous and genial in our efforts to expand their reach.