Tag: creativity

I've been mulling Arthur C. Brooks article in The Atlantic, "Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think" -- cheerily subtitled "Here how to make the most of it."

My first thought was: this article has an important core, but somehow was badly edited. The title seems to have been made up by someone for whom such a prospect seems distant. The subtitle is straight-up advice-column mush. Worse, Brooks seems to have buried the lede --something that he does not do elsewhere in his writings,, and is done here in such a way that it's not a sign of his alleged decline. I cannot avoid wondering whether somehow The Atlantic's editors were nervous about this article, and whether it touched some raw nerve, perhaps in an editor closer to Brook's age than the one who titled the article.

Brooks lede is important, and worth reading and emphasis. In the course of the article, he recounts their stories, and concludes, "Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin. How does one do that?"

Well, not by working for a think-tank, no matter how distinguished. Some of Brook's nervousness seems to me to be a product of the Massachusetts Avenue hothouse in DC: the American Enterprise Institute is right next door to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, and across the street from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the Peterson Institute of International Economics. (I regret slighting other worthy organizations on those blocks.). Just a little competitive, no? And from this perch is one supposed not to feel old past 45?

Maybe because I've always worked in higher education I'm used these past decades to being an old person amidst the young --since I was 28, in fact. I have known so many young people, and like them, work well with them, and certainly am not threatened by them. I see their youth and ingenuity up close well enough to know that being young "before professional decline" can be a great, good thing --and not, much of time. Especially now, in the age of locked-down anxiety.

Years ago a wonderful Benedictine monk, the Rev. Fr. Gabriel Coless, who has the serene, very long-now outlook of his order, taught me a lasting lesson. Coless was reflecting on a common experience: a mannerly University building operations worker was reviving a recalcitrant air conditioner on a warm September day in a seminar room, while several students gossiped about a particularly idiotic, recent scandal involving a certain professor of theology, and the spouse of another one. Just after the uniformed, sweaty, good-natured mechanic left the room, Coless commented, "the order of practical wisdom and the order of academic intelligence have nothing to do with each other." The mechanic knew nothing of Scholastic theology, but treated people well and was intensely loyal to a wife with a long-term chronic illness. His practical wisdom outshone any of the supposed academic brilliance reposing in that other asinine, arrogant professor. Young people, no less than their elders, can confuse academic brilliance with practical intelligence, and one suspects nowhere so much as in Washington think tanks.

Brooks draws on British psychologist Raymond Cattell's distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence, and finds that fluid intelligence has special valence for young people. He's right, but sparkling fluid intelligence is not much use to a considerable majority of young people, who either don't have much of it to begin with, or must cope with circumstances very different from the denizens of think tanks and the academy. Brooks example, perhaps drawn from Cattell: poets done with half their creative output by age 40, on account of the waning of their fluid intelligence? If the other half is done by, let's say, age 80, that's a lengthening and changing of creativity, but hardly its senescence. Just lately I've been reading the late W.S. Merwin, who produced such amazing work in his 80s--exactly because he was setting his mental and creative habits when he was in his 20s and 30s. His later work was nothing he might have imagined fifty years before, but he could not have done it without his earlier work. Perhaps I am merely cherry-picking a contrary example, but I believe that there are many others, as well. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, published 2004, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a year later--when she was 62-63, and twenty years after her earlier well-received fiction, Housekeeping. Her writing took a long time to crystalize. Does that mean she lost her fluidity of expression and imagination, or merely removed the incidental to reveal the essential, sculpted away the unnecessary stone to reveal the true figure?

That is Brook's most arresting and poignant metaphor --shaping his life by subtracting what is extraneous.

What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill, and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of. I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships until I can clearly see my refined self in its best form.

Printed version, July 2019, page 73

After listening to the wisdom of the Hindu sage Acharya ("Teacher"), Brooks makes four specific commitments:

• Jump (leaving his current status and prestige)
• Serve (fully sharing ideas in the service of others, primarily by teaching at a university --more about that in a moment)
• Worship refreshment of the soul, pursuing one's spiritual heritage, shaping work itself as a transcendental commitment
• Connect --becoming more conscious of the roots that bind us together, each to each (as aspen trees).

Brooks avoided E.M. Forster's "Only connect" --by now maybe trite, but still just resistant enough to mere sentimentality.

These worthy commitments and important insights were unfortunately buried under a load of repetitive citations from social science and real editorial nervousness. I wish Brooks had started his article with his account of his earlier, unhappy career as a professional French Hornist. That story leads directly to Brook's specific commitments, and foreshadowed his later encounter with some famous, bitter old man on a plane. Then distill the social science before the conclusion.

That no one can maintain peak professional performance indefinitely is no news, however many people (especially men, but sometimes women) attempt it. How many failed intimate relationships are the collateral damage of such fantasies! That intelligence and imagination changes as one ages is also no real news.

The poignant force of Brook's piece is that he realizes all this from his vantage point in elite Washington, and is willing to step away before others might wish he had. How different are the current, comparative cases of Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas --the later seems simply to have soured in self-imposed isolation beyond what even many conservatives can stomach, while the former must watch many of her life's deep commitments under assault every term. Her grace and wit outshines his embittered silence.

Brooks apparently desires to teach in a universtiy, and I wish him well. I doubt that he will have to get sucked into the machinery of academic life --advising, committee work, and empty sloganeering from so-called thought-leaders (much less the poisonous atmosphere of freedom-versus-safety controversies). I've certainly seen enough academic colleagues simply rot on the vine (in some cases with alcohol), and in other cases turn so rancid that their colleagues dearly desire their departure under any circumstances whatsoever. I've also watched faculty in the later years connect with students in a manner that changes their lives (both the students', and sometimes the teacher's). I hope the latter for Brooks, knowing that such connection is forged in a lifetime of experience, some of it unhappy, and in thinking and re-thinking about what is really important.

May the sculpture of his life reveal a strength and liveliness that would be lost in a think-tank, and may his students rise and bless his memory decades later. Only connect.