The quality of genius
By Renae Bottom
Columnist
I once took a college literature class with a girl from Eastern Europe. I don’t recall which country she came from, or how she ended up at a school in the middle of Nebraska. She had dark hair and lively brown eyes, but she wasn’t the sort of person who would catch your attention in a room. Average-looking, a novelist might say, with a medium build and little fashion sense.
It came up in class one day that she spoke six languages. I’m usually skeptical when people say they speak six languages, but this girl was fluent. And funny. Maybe, when you amass the humor of six cultures in one mind, you develop a keen sense of irony. Maybe geniuses are just funny in general, I don’t know.
She told a story once about the governments of the world, and how they’ve developed think tanks to postulate responses to a possible alien invasion, should one occur.
“We won’t know how to stop them,” she said of the aliens, “but we will know how to talk about it.”
I still love her, for that observation alone.
She said she had learned all those languages by translating Shakespeare into whatever tongue she was studying at the moment. I think I curtsied to her after that.
She loved words and the rest of us loved words, because most of us were planning to be English teachers, so we had a marvelous, geeky time, the way you do when you find your people.
One day we shared poems in class. I think hers was one she had translated, but she may have written it herself. It spoke of a dark winter night, the sort of night when the sky promises snow but withholds it.
It described how children stepped from their houses into the streets, looking up and searching the clouds, trying to catch a glimpse of the first snowflakes that would fall and free the rest to follow. And when those snowflakes finally appeared, the poem said, it suddenly became clear why snow falls at all: It’s called down by the longing eyes of children.
I’ve never looked at falling snow the same way since.
Years later, I met another unremarkable person. He was an elderly man, though I was only 40 at the time and had no idea what that meant. He had been tall once, but was now stooped and stiff. We were at a summer workshop for writers, the sort of thing English teachers do in the off-season.
He worked himself into a desk. He looked like someone’s retired-professor grandfather, a little gruff, a lot curmudgeonly. He wouldn’t have caught your attention in a room.
The time came to share poems. I read one about daughters. We went around the circle and his turn arrived. I expected something about playing golf in knickers or a train ride to the World’s Fair.
His poem described a field of cornstalks choked with blackbirds. He spoke of watching them from a nearby road until, perhaps near dusk, they all rose at once, heaved up, he said, like a fisherman’s net, cast from the prow of a wooden boat, unfolding on itself and billowing out until the fisherman released it from one corner and it settled on the water.
I’ve never looked at a flock of birds the same way since.
It’s hard to spot a genius in a room. They look a lot like the rest of us. I’ve met at least two in my lifetime, though I’d never have known it by seeing them.
Their words gave them away.