'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

We were about to sit down to dinner, when I realised that the fruit salad wasn’t on the table. I went into the kitchen, opened the fridge and, and….couldn’t remember why I was there. Back in the dining room, some moments later, all was made clear. Perhaps this is God’s way of making you feel like a turnip, or perhaps it’s a sign of genius.
 
They say, it gets worse with old age, but I am not so sure. More recently it’s been known as short term memory loss, but absentmindedness could be another word for it, and that’s something I have always suffered from. Absentmindedness is really one thought replacing another without your consent. The new thought is just so attractive that you give up on what was previously going on and make love to the new beauty in your brain.

Of course, this type of mental process can take place on a far larger stage. Only this morning, I wrote about how we in the Western World have spent the last 50 years learning to live together, somehow forgetting about Ireland and Yugoslavia and the many other examples of bloody intolerance which have marked this period. It doesn’t alter my perception of the road to greater toleration that we have been on. Our acceptance of the different and unfamiliar today, compared to the nineteen fifties is self evident, but in all honesty these European conflicts just did not come to mind. Could this have had something to do with the fact that they didn’t suit my argument? That is a distinct and extremely unpalatable possibility.

We are fickle creatures. If a more attractive thought comes along we ditch the old one. If there is something which would upset our beautiful surmise it is not brought to mind. We all like to think of ourselves as open-minded, but without considerable self-monitoring of our mental processes, there is absolutely no chance of this being so.

‘Genius’ must be an extreme form of this fickleness, and probably why it is so associated with absentmindedness, and why such people can discern one great truth while ignoring so many others. It is all about focus in the end. You focus in, and you miss the larger view, you focus out and you miss the detail. Even if you have a very large lens, which geniuses must have, for an overall perspective you must recall what you saw when it was on the other setting. This is quite a trick to pull and requires a kind of genius in itself.

I feel as if I am a clear sighted, reasonable individual, who has an excellent capacity for assimilation and judgement. Most of us must feel like that. Most of us are in fact more sporadic in our assimilation and more selective in our judgement than we would ever care to credit or admit. People sometimes talk to me and I just don’t take in a word of what they say. It would be nice to describe this as a symptom of genius, but I am afraid that this is simply a human symptom. It is an affliction which we all suffer from, notably including but not exclusive to genius.

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