The School For Geniuses

"The Voice of One crying in the Wilderness ..."

St.John 1:23

Audite vocem meam, Domine.

It seems to me that the growth or development of the 'genius'--his growth through experience--is akin symbolically to the act of relentlessly climbing a mountain--the mountain of experience, of knowledge, of life. And it is a struggle indeed! But when one has finally reached the 'top'--assuming in the first place that one actually does reach a 'top', all things being relative, one gazes around from the top of the moutain-peak of life, and soon notices that there are certain others also situated upon mountain peaks of their own--some higher, some lower than one's own--shining or burning with as bright and visible a luminosity as one feels radiating from within oneself, and also enjoying the rarefied atmosphere of pure, strong, emotional and intellectual experience.

One also notices, however, with an immediate feeling of profound despair and terror, the enormous degree to which one is forever cut off from the multitudes of the so-called 'normal' people--those many still trapped and dwelling blithely and ignorantly in the atmospherically-dense valleys of comfort below. One both wants to be with those in the valleys of ignorance--because one LOVES, and cannot bear to be alone, and yet does not want to be where they are, because--even moreso--one cannot abide the somnolent mediocrity, boredom, and aimlessness of that existence; nor can one trade one's hard-won, immensely-valued knowledge and experience for the ignorance one formerly possessed (and which the vast majority below and around one still possess); one somehow feels, with all one's soul, that this is a negative end to be avoided at all cost.

Thus it is that, because of this profound, terrifying isolation and loneliness, one feels an imperative need to cry out desperately toward those other few souls one glimpses in the distance who have also successfully climbed their mountains of experience. For how else is one to survive where one is? For having only recently arrived at one's new level of experience, one feels much as a newborn child must feel, though unable to articulate or understand it--an acute disorientation and the terrifying fear of the new and unknown, not having had the benefit of any sort of guide in this long uphill struggle--not one single human soul who might have calmed one's fears, who might have explained the true significance of one's sorrows. What else can one do, except call out toward one's fellow-travellers for (if nothing else) the occasional comforting word?

For to be long isolated in such manner from other feeling human souls must lead inevitably to either insanity or suicide, given our present emotional limitations and instabilities; and therefore, since we are loath to return to the valleys of sloth, indolence and ignorance, we find that--simply to survive--we truly MUST seek communion with others of our kind.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

--Tennyson.


T.J.White, 10 February, 1995.