Flourishing consists of positive emotion, meaning, engagement, healthy relationships, and accomplishment – the success of a life well lived. The acronym is “PERMA”. This is the characterizing feature of Nettle’s third and ultimate level of happiness. Don’t focus on negative things; focus on the positive, and you will flourish. [attributed to Alek Wek] Human well-being is not a random phenomenon….
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Value for Tuesday of Week 25 in the season of Ripening
Being Intellectually Excellent
Each of us is challenged to make the most of our natural intellectual potential.
- I distrust the rash optimism in this country that cries, “Hurrah, we’re all right! This is the greatest nation on earth,” when there are grievances that call loudly for redress. That is false optimism. Optimism that does not count the cost is like a house builded on sand. A man must understand evil and be acquainted with sorrow before he can write himself an optimist and expect others to believe that he has reason for the faith that is in him. [Helen Keller, “Optimism” (1903), Part i.]
- The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. [F. Scott Fitzgerald]
- It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others. [attributed to Michel de Montaigne]
- Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change. [attributed to Stephen Hawking]
- . . . the brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. [Carl Sagan]
Human progress is attributable not only to the rare geniuses who have revolutionized intellectual life, science and technology but also to the journeymen who have used their considerable talents to apply knowledge in their communities. For example, brilliant researchers discover new medicines, and communities rely on doctors to use those medications. People routinely make fun of lawyers, until they need one. Despite unfortunate strains of anti-intellectualism in many societies, people turn to those who have developed their talents and abilities through study and practice, in ways that exceed the grasp of average members of the community.
“Intelligence is the ability to learn from experience and to adapt to, shape, and select environments.” It can also be defined as “a general mental ability for reasoning, problem solving, and learning. Because of its general nature, intelligence integrates cognitive functions such as perception, attention, memory, language, or planning.” It is not strictly a personal trait but is also a function of tasks and interactions.
Intelligence is positively associated with prosocial behavior, and leadership. “People with high IQs seem to be at an advantage in coping with traumatic events . . .”
Some scholars argue that intelligence enhances social learning. Others argue that it contributes to creativity and innovation. Others argue that it is of benefit in the arts.
These claims are entirely consistent with each other. Nine kinds of intelligence have been identified. Only some of them are highly valued in society, including our economic system. “. . . poor perception of intelligence, rooted in historical realities, means that it will continue to be misunderstood, feared, and misused, limiting how effective it could be in helping to close gaps in achievement and in creating a more equitable society.”
Real
True Narratives
The writings of intellectually advanced people serve as narratives of their developed gifts.
- Christopher Hitchens, Arguably: Essays (Twelve, 2011).
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Portrait in Letters of an of an American Visionary (PublicAffairs, 2010).
- Lydia Davis, Essays One (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019): “She is our Vermeer, patiently observing and chronicling daily life but from angles odd and askew.”
- Lydia Davis, Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021): “. . . Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising.”
Diaries of Susan Sontag, who stood apart from “other two-handers, like Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal (in) her worship of intellectualism as a goal in itself.”
- Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (2008).
- Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012).
Books about intelligent people:
- Michelle Dean, Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (Grove Press, 2018): “Dean gathered these women together, she says in her preface, ‘under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: They were called sharp.’”
- Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018): “Whether he’s eulogizing or skewering, Amis’s formidable wit and intelligene are tempered by occasional flashes of condescension.”
- Ingrid Sischy, Nothing Is Lost: Selected Essays (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018): “If you wanted to know what interested the American artistic and intellectual elite in the 1980s, ’90s and early aughts, you couldn’t find a better, truer hologram than the one Ingrid Sischy provided in her essays during those years. She shows us the glitz of that epoch of celebrity culture as well as the serious, thoughtful concerns of its cutting-edge painters and designers . . .”
- Richard Aldous, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017): “Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. stood at the intersection of the nation’s cultural and political life.”
- Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019): “Holmes is the second most influential justice ever to have graced the bench, after Chief Justice John Marshall, who first got the court to overturn laws and set the body on its long path to constitutional supremacy.”
- Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade and Reinvented Philosophy (Penguin, 2020): “. . . focuses on a decade of crisis in Europe — the interwar period between 1919 and 1929 — and argues compellingly that a small cadre of thinkers responded to their turbulent times by reinventing philosophy, an intellectual task that effectively conjured a new world.”
- Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (Farrar, Straus &. Giroux, 2021): “Changing one’s mind, publicly at that, was simply part of the intellectual’s evolving understanding of the world.”
- John Walsh, Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World (Constable, 2022): “One of the best things about 'Circus of Dreams' is Walsh’s memories not of the big beasts of literature, but of the smaller players — the editors and agents and clubmen and hacks and P.R. people, the various legends in their own lunchtimes.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
- Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (Penguin Press, 2013): a “judicious and insightful book on human and machine intelligence”
- Nathan L. King, The Excellent Mind: Intellectual Virtues for Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2021).
From the dark side:
- Anthony Kronman, The Assault on American Excellence (Free Press, 2019): “The book laments the politicization of academic life.”
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- When We Were Kings, about how Muhammad Ali won a boxing match with his intelligence
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution, Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the Revolution and its philosophy there exists this difference--that its logic may end in war, whereas its philosophy can end only in peace. Combeferre complemented and rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty, but broader. He desired to pour into all minds the extensive principles of general ideas: he said: "Revolution, but civilization"; and around the mountain peak he opened out a vast view of the blue sky. The Revolution was more adapted for breathing with Combeferre than with Enjolras. Enjolras expressed its divine right, and Combeferre its natural right. The first attached himself to Robespierre; the second confined himself to Condorcet. Combeferre lived the life of all the rest of the world more than did Enjolras. If it had been granted to these two young men to attain to history, the one would have been the just, the other the wise man. Enjolras was the more virile, Combeferre the more humane. _Homo_ and _vir_, that was the exact effect of their different shades. Combeferre was as gentle as Enjolras was severe, through natural whiteness. He loved the word _citizen_, but he preferred the word _man_. He would gladly have said: _Hombre_, like the Spanish. He read everything, went to the theatres, attended the courses of public lecturers, learned the polarization of light from Arago, grew enthusiastic over a lesson in which Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire explained the double function of the external carotid artery, and the internal, the one which makes the face, and the one which makes the brain; he kept up with what was going on, followed science step by step, compared Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the pebble which he found and reasoned on geology, drew from memory a silkworm moth, pointed out the faulty French in the Dictionary of the Academy, studied Puységur and Deleuze, affirmed nothing, not even miracles; denied nothing, not even ghosts; turned over the files of the _Moniteur_, reflected. He declared that the future lies in the hand of the schoolmaster, and busied himself with educational questions. He desired that society should labor without relaxation at the elevation of the moral and intellectual level, at coining science, at putting ideas into circulation, at increasing the mind in youthful persons, and he feared lest the present poverty of method, the paltriness from a literary point of view confined to two or three centuries called classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants, scholastic prejudices and routines should end by converting our colleges into artificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist, exact, a graduate of the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time, thoughtful "even to chimæras," so his friends said. He believed in all dreams, railroads, the suppression of suffering in chirurgical operations, the fixing of images in the dark chamber, the electric telegraph, the steering of balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed by the citadels erected against the human mind in every direction, by superstition, despotism, and prejudice. He was one of those who think that science will eventually turn the position. Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre was a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and to march behind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than for conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke, progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends, captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress, good progress, take its own course; he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but irreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have knelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in all its candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous evolution of the races. _The good must be innocent_, he repeated incessantly. And in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consists in keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thither athwart the lightnings, with fire and blood in its talons, the beauty of progress lies in being spotless; and there exists between Washington, who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, that difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of an eagle. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume III – Marius; Book Fourth – The Friends of the A B C, Chapter I, “A Group which barely missed becoming Historic”.]
Other novels:
- Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2018): “Halliday’s novel is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction.”
Poetry
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Frederic Mompou’s piano music (approx. 284’) is consistently thoughtful. “Mompou’s œuvre is small but immensely personal, containing mostly piano miniatures and songs as well as several choral works. ” His work “is radically simple, spare, mystical, and utterly unclassifiable as to style—all this in a century that favored intellectual feats on the part of composers who classified themselves into schools and 'isms.'” Highly reviewed albums of Mompou’s piano music are Paul Crossley, “The Sad Smile” (2025) (72’), and Arcadi Volodos, “Volodos Plays Mompou” (2013) (63’). His longer works for piano, and albums of his piano music, are:
- Musica Callada (music that has fallen silent) (1959) (approx. 68-69’)
- Federico Mompou plays Mompou, Cançons i danses: Nos. 1-3; Nos. 4-6; Nos. 7-9; Nos. 10-12 - (1921-1963) (approx. 44-46’)
- Impresiones intimas (1914) (approx. 21’)
- Twelve preludes for piano (1927) (approx. 31’)
- Fêtes lointaines (1920) (approx. 11’)
- Paisajes (Paysages) (1942) (approx. 12’)
- Cants majics (Magic Songs) (1917) (approx. 10-13’)
- Suburbis, Suite for piano (1916) (approx. 12-16’)
- Variations on a Theme by Chopin (1938) (approx. 21-22’)
Iannis Xenakis was a “Romanian-born French composer, architect, and mathematician who originated musique stochastique, music composed with the aid of electronic computers and based upon mathematical probability systems.” “Although few could claim to understand his complex, mathematically derived music theories, the avant-garde composer's prodigious output, technological innovation, and acclaim in the world of modern classical music gave him fame that few other contemporary composers could match.” “As of 1988, Xenakis (was) the author of just over one hundred works, utterly distinctive in style, yet always testimony to inner restlessness, to a need to be ‘on the move’.” His works include:
- Dikhthas (1979) (approx. 13’);
- Persepolis (1971) (approx. 57-60’);
- Tetora (1990) (approx. 15’);
- Tetras (1983) (approx. 15’);
- Nomos alpha (1966) (approx. 12’);
- Ikhoor (1978) (approx. 8’);
- Dmaathen (1977) (approx. 13’);
- Plektó (1993) (approx. 8’);
- Achorripsis (1957) (approx. 5’);
- St/4 1-080262 (1962) (approx. 11’);
- Persephassa (1969) (approx. 29’);
- Psappha (1975) (approx. 14’);
- Pléïades (1978) (approx. 42’);
- Komboï (1981) (approx. 18’);
- Kassandra (1987) (approx. 16’);
- Okho (1989) (approx. 13’);
- Oophaa (1989) (approx. 12’); and
- Rebonds (1989) (approx. 8’).
Karl Amadeus Hartmann composed with intellectual subtlety in opposition to Nazism. “Although Hans-Werner Heister alludes to Hartmann's brief involvement in an underground anti-fascist network, Hartmann scholarship for the most part constructs arguments of inner emigration and resistance in terms of a paradigm of aesthetic communication, one of 'writing between the lines'.” “A number of Hartmann’s compositions show the profound effect of the political climate.” These include his early symphonies:
- Symphony No. 1, “Versuch eines Requiem” (1936) (approx. 27’) (list of recorded performances)
- Symphony No. 2 (1946) (approx. 15’)
- Symphony No. 3 (1949) (approx. 30’)
- Symphony No. 4 (1947) (approx. 32’) (list of recorded performances)
- Symphony No. 5 (1950) (approx. 15’) (list of recorded performances)
Other works:
- Vagn Holmboe, Requiem for Nietszche, M 219, Op. 84 (1964) (approx. 52’), is a contemporary cantata exploring the inner workings of a great ponderer of ideas. “Requiem for Nietzsche is in no way a proper liturgical requiem. Based on texts by now-unknown (at least outside his native land) Danish poet Thorkild Bjørnvig, it does not so much tell the story of the life of the great philosopher but rather, according to the liner notes, '…integrates references of Nietzsche’s life into an imaginative recreation of his struggles.'”
- Leopold Godowsky, Piano Sonata in E minor (1911) (47’) (list of recorded performances) “is an impressive piece allowing for passing doubts about the place of the wonderfully Bachian three-part fugue in the finale.”
Today, we have the thinking person’s pianist, Alfred Brendel. He has made leading recordings of many great works, mainly from the Classical and early Romantic eras.
- Haydn, piano sonatas;
- Mozart, piano works;
- Beethoven, piano works;
- Beethoven, piano sonatas;
- Schubert, piano works;
- Lizst, piano works.
Albums:
- Jeff Albert Quartet, “Similar in the Opposite Way” (2008) (45’) is an album of complex, avant-garde jazz with internal movement over time, and direction.
- Tim Berne, “Science Friction” (2002) (52’) “takes the possibilities of composed and improvised new jazz to another level . . .” “Berne remains one of the most distinctive voices in modern jazz, who—best of all—seems to have an uncanny ability to assemble sympathetic musical collaborators who share his vision.”
- David Berkman Sextet, “Six of One”: “Lots to grasp here . . .” [Larry Hollis, Cadence magazine 2019 annual edition, p. 273.]
- Peng-Chian Chen, “Electrocosmia” (2021) (48’) “explores the intersection of new classical composition with electronics, as well as the many philosophical and real-world implications thereof.”
- Karl Larson, “Dark Days” (2021) (49’) is an album of piano miniatures composed by Scott Wollschleger, similar to Mompou’s works.
- Roberto Occhipinti, “The Next Step” (2022) (56’): the artist combines jazz and classical techniques.
- Seth Parker Woods, “Difficult Grace” (2023) (62’): “An evocative, theatrical, and genre-bending collaboration with choreographer/dancer Roderick George, Difficult Grace is a multimedia concert tour de force conceived by and featuring Woods in the triple role of cellist, narrator/guide, and movement artist . . .” “Woods was already a cellist of prodigious technical gifts and sharp intellect. This program has stretched him even further into performing as a spoken word artist and singer as well as instrumentalist.”
