My Year With Proust - Day 113

"But if it was one and the same intelligence which we had, he and I , at our disposal, he must, when he heard me express those ideas, be reminded of them, cherish them, smile upon them, keeping probably, in spite of what I supposed, before his mind's eye, quite a different part of his intelligence than that of which an excerpt had passed into his books, an excerpt upon which I had based my notion of his whole mental universe.  Just as priests, having the widest experience of the human heart, are best able to pardon the sins which they do not themselves commit, so genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its own works.  I ought to have told myself all this (though in fact it is none too consoling a thought, for the benevolent condescension of great minds has as a corollary the incomprehension and hostility of small; and one delivers far less happiness from the amiability of a great writer, which one can find after all in his books, than suffering from the hostility of a woman whom one did not choose for her intelligence but cannot help loving)."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 612

Here Proust is reflecting upon another conversation he had with the writer Bergotte, who he both admired and also later befriended.  He is reflecting upon his perception of what he assumes Bergotte is feeling hearing the younger man talk about the writings of the author.

Typically, I find these comments very insightful, and let me approach it in a relatively circuitous and odd fashion (which is also typical).  I have this theory, hardly original, that most of the greatest saints started out as wretched sinners, although I explain it through baseball (most of my theories have as their foundation baseball, which is, along with jazz, the only two things of genius that have their origins in America).  Most of the best baseball managers were pretty unremarkable players; second string catchers from AAA who couldn't hit a curve ball, which left them plenty of time to sit on the bench, pick the brains of the manager, and study the game.  They became great managers partly because they understand how hard the game is, unlike a truly great player who doesn't understand that the answer is not simply to go up in the 9th inning and hit a home run.  It's much the same way with saints, the most forgiving ones are not the ones who never have an impure thoughts, but the ones who understand how challenging life is.

Proust, who is clearly a tad smarter than me, although he never seems to discuss baseball at all, is taking a somewhat similar approach.  He proposes that, "Just as priests, having the widest experience of the human heart, are best able to pardon the sins which they do not themselves commit, so genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its own works."  What I like about this is that he's helping me distinguish between someone who is a genius and someone who is just really damn smart.  Some of the smartest people I know are also the least perceptive and the least tolerant of other opinions.  They have almost a spiked intelligence, that leaves them masters in a very narrow field but seems to leave them perplexed by anything outside of that narrow range.  Maybe what separates our a genius is an expansive fluidity to their intelligence; not only do they see more and are more tolerant of what they're seeing, but they naturally grasp how it all comes together, they see connections that others don't see.