• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2361 0

very few equations that I have found that many physical pictures can give the same equations. So I am spending my time in study—in seeing how many new viewpoints I can take of what is known.” By then Welton had mastered the field theory that was becoming standard, and he was surprised to discover that his old friend had not. Feynman seemed to hoard shadow pools of ignorance, seemed to protect himself from the light like a waking man who closes his eyes to preserve a fleeting image left over from a dream. He said later, “Maybe that’s why young people make success. They don’t know enough. Because when you know enough it’s obvious that every idea that you have is no good.” Welton, too, was persuaded that if Feynman had known more, he could not have innovated so well.

“Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.” An Egyptian scribe fixed those words in stone at the very dawn of recorded utterance—already jaded, a millennium before Homer. Modern critics speak of the burden of the past and the anxiety of influence, and surely the need to innovate is an ancient part of the artist’s psyche, but novelty was never as crucial to the artist as it became in the twentieth century. The useful lifetime of a new form or genre was never so short. Artists never before felt so much pressure to violate such young traditions.

Meanwhile, before their eyes, the world has grown too vast and multifarious for the towering genius of the old kind. Artists struggle to keep their heads above the tide. Norman Mailer, publishing yet another novel doomed to fall short of ambitions formed in an earlier time, notices: “There are no large people any more. I’ve been studying Picasso lately and look at who his contemporaries were: Freud, Einstein.” He saw the change in his own lifetime without understanding it. (Few of those looking for genius understood where it had gone.) He appeared on a literary scene so narrow that conventional first novels by writers like James Jones made them appear plausible successors to Faulkner and Hemingway. He slowly sank into a thicket of hundreds of equally talented, original, and hard-driving novelists, each just as likely to be tagged as a budding genius. In a world into which Amis, Beckett, Cheever, Drabble, Ellison, Fuentes, Grass, Heller, Ishiguro, Jones, Kazantzakis, Lessing, Nabokov, Oates, Pym, Queneau, Roth, Solzhenitsyn, Theroux, Updike, Vargas Llosa, Waugh, Xue, Yates, and Zoshchenko—or any other two dozen fiction writers—had never been born, Mailer and any other potential genius would have had a better chance of towering. In a less crowded field, among shorter yardsticks, a novelist would not just have seemed bigger. He would have been bigger. Like species competing in ecological niches, he would have had a broader, richer space to explore and occupy. Instead the giants force one another into specialized corners of the intellectual landscape. They choose among domestic, suburban, rural, urban, demimondaine, Third World, realist, postrealist, semirealist, antirealist, surrealist, decadent, ultraist, expressionist, impressionist, naturalist, existentialist, metaphysical, romance, romanticist, neoromanticist, Marxist, picaresque, detective, comic, satiric, and countless other fictional modes—as sea squirts, hagfish, jellyfish, sharks, dolphins, whales, oysters, crabs, lobsters, and countless hordes of marine species subdivide the life-supporting possibilities of an ocean that was once, for billions of years, dominated quite happily by blue-green algae.

“Giants have not ceded to mere mortals,” the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in an iconoclastic 1983 essay. “Rather, the boundaries … have been restricted and the edges smoothed.” He was not talking about algae, artists, or paleontologists but about baseball players. Where are the .400 hitters? Why have they vanished into the mythic past, when technical skills, physical conditioning, and the population