The New Romantics

I contend that the creator is an individual who manages a most formidable challenge: to wed the most advanced understandings achieved in a domain with the kinds of problems, questions, issues, and sensibilities that most characterized his or her life as a wonder-filled child.

Genius is the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . Allen points out that “people often start diaries in times of upheaval,”

We have become used to the ease and convenience of our digital lives, and we expect the same offline. A slick, transactional, no-strings-attached kind of life, predictable and controllable.

The people we traditionally consider to be smartest are those best at some sort of a general math / reasoning ability.

This is not what genius is.

Here on my screen was the distillation of a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.

In a culture obsessed with speed, certainty, and specialization, Leonardo’s secret feels almost rebellious: take your time, learn widely, think deeply.