smart: adj. having or showing a quick witted intelligence;
showing impertinence by making clever or sarcastic remarks
wit: noun. mental sharpness and inventiveness;
keen intelligence;
a natural aptitude for using words and ideas in a quick and inventive way to create humor.
I was thinking the other day about what it means to be smart or intelligent. Probably because I'm studying for the GRE and am terrified I will get to the issue essay portion and have nothing to say about the prompt given to me. It seems silly but when asked to give specific examples or reasons to support or argue against why it is dangerous to trust only intelligence or why the main purpose of science is to reassure while art is meant to upset, or why patriotic reverence for the history of a nation often does more to impede than to encourage progress, I get a little flustered. I mean it seems simple enough but a good essay should have a level of wit to it, and good sound examples, supporting conclusions, and I just don't seem to carry a lot of random facts around with me. The extemporaneousness of the it scares me.
While I like to write, and I think that I'm a fair enough writer by any standards, I also like to take my time, research, mull things over and to be blunt about it I'm a little uncomfortable with a first draft of anything, like shitting out an issue essay for the GRE to be kept on record for any school to see, about something I might not care about at all or have any interest in arguing for or against, and what if I can't think of a clever enough example to suggest that no matter what the situation , it is more harmful to compromise one's beliefs than to adhere to them?
Anyway, I'm just not good at that sort of thing and I'm absolutely shaking in my shoes just thinking about it. I will freeze, deer in head-light style, at the thought of producing evidence of how the arts reveal the otherwise hidden ideas and impulses of a society, or an example of how it would be impossible for an effective politician to tell the truth all the time.
I think these prompt are simultaneously too broad and too specific. Too broad in the sense that they are all covering four main topics, the arts, technology, history, politics which is fine with me if the prompts themselves weren't so irritatingly peculiar. I'm not thinking about how politics and morality are in the same realm? are they? should they be? Do I not understand either of these concepts if I differentiate the two?
As of right now, so currently, but not at this very moment, I'm reading Franny And Zooey. One of it's prominent themes is about intelligence and wit and the idea that these siblings who were taught at a very young age by their two older brothers before they were biased with the knowledge of conventional schooling have grown up to be a little freak-like and are incapable of tolerating the average Joes of the world because they are bored with the stupidity of simple conversation. They are damned to be too smart and witty for their own good. Incidentally it makes for interesting dialog in the short novel but brings on the thought that intelligence is lonely for those living among the less intelligent. There was an episode of House recently that said the same thing which I thought was interesting. In the episode, a man who was publishing essays on principles of physics at the age of 18 or something like that, a mathematical genius, all of a sudden dropped everything to work as a postal worker and a marry a pretty wife and settle down. Dr. House found out he'd been taking a drug to make him stupider, to drop his IQ down a little so that he could live a simple life, in peace, and be happy.
Happiness for this one prodigy was not having the burden of intelligence.
Of course in the end he decided it was better to balance the two out but the notion struck me as a bit unnerving.
If intelligence doesn't make you happy, but is often the key to humor, Is humor not the key to being happy either, or is the joke on us?
No comments:
Post a Comment