“What the Dog Saw”

Part Three; Personality, Character and Intelligence.
“Late Bloomers; Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity?”

“What the Dog Saw” by Malcolm Gladwell was my companion through my trip to Italy.  It framed many of my experiences, from discovering the flavour of umami as a clue to why Italian food is so excellent, to noticing the graceful and emphatic body language of Italians.  One insight especially resonated with my state of mind at the time.

Soon into his essay about genius, Gladwell parlays some stats and quickly debunks the artist as child prodigy myth.  He then meanders into a hypothesis; there are two kinds of artists.  One, the prodigy, is a conceptual artist.  His ideas arise fully formed and then are transmitted through the medium.  The second is experimental.  She doesn’t know the end product, her art is a method of searching.  These are the late bloomers.  Gladwell wrote of an artist who went to Haiti 30 times; without a clear idea of why or what he planned to do.  In the end a best-selling book emerged. 

At the time of reading, I was on a trip for which I had only a vague notion of why I was there.  I was following some vague instinct.  A vague, expensive instinct.  I did not have any grand experiences or life-changing insights.  I made some mistakes.  Much like the rest of my life, which is a comedy of trial and error.  There are many things I like to do, and many things that interest me, but I do not have that overriding concept of “I must do this and live here”.  Therefore, most of my activities, trips, jobs, decisions, are experiments.  Some work, half don’t.  My life is like a crappy rough draft of an immature artist.  The essay gave me hope that the things I chip away at, the ideas I mull over, and the experiences I chase may one day coalesce into something grander than myself.