there is a certain ache that attends the study of the extraordinary.
to read the lives of newton, engelbart, kay — is to realize that the world, from time to time, conspires to produce something rare.
and you find yourself wondering: is it accident? ancestry? a trick of circumstance?
more urgently: if i ever have a child, could i build the kind of world where brilliance becomes possible?
i should say it plainly: i’m no parent.
no lineage yet extends from me.
i write only as someone who was once permitted the rare grace to wonder — to be — without too much interference.
through the reading of lives, and the slow accumulation of patterns, certain suspicions have begun to take shape.
i offer no answers.
only provocations, stitched together with admiration and a certain uneasy hope.
1. perhaps the shaping begins before the first breath.
it is not fashionable to say it, but nature is rarely democratic.
pattern recognition, restless curiosity, a mind quick to assemble meaning — these are not gifted equally.
yet even rare endowments, left without nurture, rot quietly in the soil.
nature hands you the instrument.
whether you ever play it is another story.
2. perhaps the spark is never taught — only caught.
prodigies are not manufactured by instruction.
they are immersed.
their childhoods are not battlegrounds of grades and compliance, but vast territories of ideas, mechanisms, mysteries.
they are abandoned — lovingly — in fields where thought is abundant, and left to wander, to break, to rebuild.
you cannot push a mind into flight.
you can only arrange the air.
3. perhaps boredom is a necessary violence.
in a world that murders silence with every flicker of a screen, true boredom is becoming a lost art.
but it is inside long, uncomfortable stretches of emptiness that the mind is forced inward — where invention first shows its teeth.
prodigies are not entertained into existence.
they are forged in hunger.
boredom is not the enemy.
it is the birthplace.
4. perhaps children do not obey instruction — only atmosphere.
no speech about the virtues of learning will move a child.
they follow the ambient weather of your soul.
if you live anesthetized, dulled by repetition, no exhortation will save them.
if you wrestle openly with ideas, if you hunger audibly, they will catch the fever.
curiosity cannot be commanded.
it must be witnessed.
5. perhaps asymmetry is the mark, not the flaw.
the lives i admire are jagged.
a child who can dismantle a radio at eight may forget to tie his shoes at ten.
a teenager who dreams in music may recoil from arithmetic.
the urge to balance them — to correct the wildness — is understandable.
and fatal.
the gardener prunes roses.
he does not lecture lightning.
6. perhaps even then, it is never truly ours to command.
you could build the forge, protect the silences, model the hunger — and the fire may still refuse to come.
genius remains sovereign.
it consents, or it withholds.
you can build the stage.
you cannot summon the gods.
the dream is not to manufacture extraordinary lives.
it is to build a house where such lives could be born — and where, if they are not, a quieter greatness still finds room to breathe.
in a world so hostile to silence, to slowness, to thought itself —
to have merely preserved the conditions for greatness may itself be a kind of miracle.