Intelligence as Ugliness?
Dana Goodyear profiles novelist Rachel Kushner in this week's issue of the New Yorker. Of Kushner's adolescence, Goodyear reports, "Among her peers, she says, 'Intelligence with a form of ugliness,' so she did her best to hide it."
This glimpse gives me a chance to reflect on why I don't. My insistence on seeing the beauty in lively, intelligent curiosity finds its roots in the same murky passage of adolescence through which Kushner deemed it essential to hide her gifts. It was during this period that I met Jim Garrick, a man incapable of hiding enthusiasm for anything. He countered coolness as the coach of a national elite academic team. In my most formative years, my psyche was shaped by associating points and praise with pushing beyond the basic outlines of a subject in order to move on to the next minimal requirement.
This was my conditioning and Garrick desired to win based on the performance of his starting lineup of knowledge machines at least as much as the adolescents in his charge did. His classroom dispelled any notion that love of learning was a pro forma performance put on as a means to beating other teams. At 10 AM on a Tuesday in a discussion of Billy Budd, Garrick was as alive to the power of knowledge as he was under the Saturday spotlight of televised competition. Somehow, I saw and absorbed that it was possible for a grown man to navigate the stultifying dullness of habitual norming expectations and still love learning and growing for its own sake.
How I tend and display that flame within has changed some over time. I live in the Bible's mindful tension that knowledge puffs up, paired in tandem with the comparison that love builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1). That I know or want to learn as my synapses fire a little more slowly in middle-age and my RAM filled up with quotidian details is confirmation of Proverbs 25:2. "It is the glory of kings to search out a matter." Why, when, or whether to share an answer I may have searched for is the product of years since points are no longer being awarded. This week's New Yorker helps here also as Patrick Radden Keefe discloses in a different profile of his subject's leadership under especially tense circumstances, "There is a practiced flair to erudition."
If we survived adolescence and adulthood with a living curiosity and a probing intelligence still intact, we may find that the wise option, the loving option is to refrain from instantly sharing what occurs to us. Practice may show us the value of timing and discretion, but I'll bet each of us has a Garrick who showed us at a crucial point in the development of our identity that we need not stifle our gifts altogether.
This glimpse gives me a chance to reflect on why I don't. My insistence on seeing the beauty in lively, intelligent curiosity finds its roots in the same murky passage of adolescence through which Kushner deemed it essential to hide her gifts. It was during this period that I met Jim Garrick, a man incapable of hiding enthusiasm for anything. He countered coolness as the coach of a national elite academic team. In my most formative years, my psyche was shaped by associating points and praise with pushing beyond the basic outlines of a subject in order to move on to the next minimal requirement.
This was my conditioning and Garrick desired to win based on the performance of his starting lineup of knowledge machines at least as much as the adolescents in his charge did. His classroom dispelled any notion that love of learning was a pro forma performance put on as a means to beating other teams. At 10 AM on a Tuesday in a discussion of Billy Budd, Garrick was as alive to the power of knowledge as he was under the Saturday spotlight of televised competition. Somehow, I saw and absorbed that it was possible for a grown man to navigate the stultifying dullness of habitual norming expectations and still love learning and growing for its own sake.
How I tend and display that flame within has changed some over time. I live in the Bible's mindful tension that knowledge puffs up, paired in tandem with the comparison that love builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1). That I know or want to learn as my synapses fire a little more slowly in middle-age and my RAM filled up with quotidian details is confirmation of Proverbs 25:2. "It is the glory of kings to search out a matter." Why, when, or whether to share an answer I may have searched for is the product of years since points are no longer being awarded. This week's New Yorker helps here also as Patrick Radden Keefe discloses in a different profile of his subject's leadership under especially tense circumstances, "There is a practiced flair to erudition."
If we survived adolescence and adulthood with a living curiosity and a probing intelligence still intact, we may find that the wise option, the loving option is to refrain from instantly sharing what occurs to us. Practice may show us the value of timing and discretion, but I'll bet each of us has a Garrick who showed us at a crucial point in the development of our identity that we need not stifle our gifts altogether.
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