My Years With Proust - Day 576

Thus nothing resembled more closely than some such phrase of Vinteuil the peculiar pleasure which I had felt at certain moments in my life, when gazing, for instance, at the steeples of Martinville, or at certain trees along a road near Balbec, or, more simply, at the beginning of this book, when I tasted a certain cup of tea.  Like that cup of tea, all these sensations of light, the bright clamour, the boisterous colours that Vinteuil sent to us from the world in which he composed, paraded before my imagination, insistently but too rapidly for me to be able to apprehend it, something that I might compare to the perfumed silkiness of a geranium.  But whereas in memory this vagueness may be, if not fathomed, at any rate identified, thanks to a pinpointing of circumstances which explain why a certain taste has been able to recall to us luminous sensations, the vague sensations given by Vinteuil coming not from a memory but from an impression (like that of the steeples of Martinville), one would have had to find, for the geranium equivalent, the unknown, colourful festival (of which his works seemed to be the disconnected fragments, the scarlet-flashing splinters), the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself.  Perhaps it was in this, I said to Albertine, this unknown quality of a unique world which no other composer had ever yet revealed, that the most authentic proof of genius lies, even more than in the content of the work itself.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 381-382

"Perhaps it was in this, I said to Albertine, this unknown quality of a unique world which no other composer had ever yet revealed, that the most authentic proof of genius lies, even more than in the content of the work itself."  I've often made the points to my students (and the long-suffering readers of my blog, naturally) that one of the most overused, and least understood, terms in the world is that of "genius."  It's certainly more than simply achieving some highly debatable number on a generated spectrum.  And while you can argue about what creates a genius (probably more nature than nurture, but it's certainly not just raw intellect) I've always proposed that you can tell when a genius has been at work because they change the world, or at least the change the rules in the field in which they operate, not because they necessarily set out to change the rules, but because they cannot not change the rules.  The rules for the world are different, because the rules under which they see the world are already different.  This is why I always promote Miles Davis as the great American genius of the 20th century - and, no, I'm not simply being contrarian.  He changed specifically jazz, and more generally music, and more profoundly culture repeatedly, almost annually for a while, because he simply viewed the world in a way differently than anyone else - and had the courage to pursue that vision (an attribute, courage, that is often forgotten when discussing genius).  I would argue that Proust is talking about the same thing in this passage when, while discussing his appreciation of the music of Vinteuil, he writes of "the mode by which he 'heard' the universe and projected it far beyond himself."