Mental Toughness

What is mental toughness? There is no simple answer and indeed there is not even just one answer. Pondering this question sent my mind racing in many directions, but one recurring thought/memory is Michael Jordan's "What is Love?" commercial. Jordan concluded, "Love is playing every game as if it's your last." Jordan never took games or even plays off, because he knew that there might be someone in the stands who had never seen him play and he wanted that person to see him at his very best.

To me, that video is a powerful testament to the intense devotion required to become the greatest practitioner of your craft (whether or not you believe Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever is not the point; he displayed the focus and the traits that are essential to challenge for that number one spot). Watching that video still evokes strong feelings in me--but my Mom was unmoved the first time she saw it. "That's not what love is," she declared. She says that love is about human relationships--about caring so much about another person that you sacrifice to make that person happy, to make that person's life better. My Mom felt that the commercial was about winning a game and winning a game is not what defines love to her.

Both perspectives are valid. Jordan's video is a testament to one kind of love but my Mom is correct that there are other kinds of love as well: parent-child, husband-wife, sibling-sibling. The Jordan commercial does not deny other kinds of love or minimize the importance of human relationships; it speaks to the power of love to inspire a person to achieve greatness.

So, what is love? Love means different things in different contexts.

What is mental toughness? Mental toughness is not defined/proven by fame or glory. I recently heard a broadcaster extolling the mental toughness that Emmitt Smith once displayed when he led the Dallas Cowboys to victory despite having a separated shoulder--and there is no doubt that this took great mental toughness. But is Smith tougher than my Grandma Ida, who fought cancer for almost five years and who never lost her optimism and her zest for life even as the cancer drained the life out of her body?

Mental toughness is doing what has to be done--doing the right thing, the life-affirming thing--no matter the odds.

Life can be bitterly cruel. It is easy to complain or to give up but perhaps it is helpful to understand that life is not only about "winning" but also about personal growth. Alexander Solzhenitsyn survived being imprisoned--buried alive might be a more accurate description--in what he later called the Gulag Archipelago but he did not curse his fate or those who oppressed him. Instead, he said, "Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul."

Mental toughness is facing down a totalitarian regime bent on destroying individuality and individuals. Solzhenitsyn did this and his writings lay bare the horrors of living under Communist rule and the flaws inherent in building a society around the Communist philosophy. Later, Natan Sharansky was arrested by the Soviet government, convicted on trumped up charges of being a spy and sentenced to 13 years in prison, including solitary confinement and hard labor; the Communist regime literally and figuratively sought to bury Sharansky alive in a hole so deep that he would be mentally, psychologically and physically destroyed. Instead, after he was sentenced he defiantly declared, "To the court I have nothing to say--to my wife and the Jewish people I say 'Next Year in Jerusalem.'"

Sharansky, a master level chess player, played chess games against himself to maintain his sanity when he was in solitary confinement. After nine years, the Soviets finally set him free in an exchange of prisoners in Berlin. Sharansky's Soviet tormentors ordered him to walk straight across a bridge, but instead Sharansky defiantly marched to freedom in zig zag fashion. Sharansky later recalled what his Communist captors had first told him when he arrived in prison: "This is the end of the Zionist movement and you will never get out alive." Instead, the Berlin Wall fell just a few years after Sharansky zig zagged his way to freedom in that city and, as Sharansky said with justifiable pride, "There is no KGB, there is no communism and more than a million former Soviet Jews are free and in Israel. It is a very triumphant feeling."

Mental toughness is maintaining sanity despite having a brain that is wired so differently than other people's brains that one is perceived to be--and may feel like--an alien. Alexander Grothendieck has been called the greatest mathematician of the 20th century but he spent his last years in seclusion, unwilling or unable to function in society the way that people are expected to function.

"My first impression was that he had been transported from an advanced alien civilization in order to speed up our intellectual evolution," Marvin Jay Greenberg, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said about meeting Grothendieck during Grothendieck's prime.

According to Kaja Perina (in an article published in the July/August 2017 issue of Psychology Today), "Thinking styles lie on a continuum. On one end is mechanistic, rule-based thinking, which is epitomized in minds that gravitate to math, science, engineering, and tech-heavy skill-sets. Mechanistic cognition is bottom-up, concerned with the laws of nature and with objects as they exist in the world, and stands in contrast to mentalistic thinking. Mentalistic cognition exists to decode and engage with the minds of others, both interpersonally and in terms of larger social forces. It is more holistic (top-down) and humanistic, concerned, broadly speaking, with people, not with things. This mind-set makes loose, sometimes self-referential inferences about reality. If  'hypermentalistic,' too much meaning will be ascribed to events: All coincidences are meaningful and all events are interconnected."

Perina argues that, in this view of thinking styles, autism is an extreme form of mechanistic thinking, while extreme mentalistic thinking is typified by "psychotic disorders, characterized by false beliefs in the sentience of inanimate objects and delusions about the self and others."

In other words, the racing thoughts and the ability to see/make unusual mental connections that made Grothendieck a mathematical genius also pushed him to the brink of insanity (at least in terms of how insanity is defined by the majority of people who consider themselves sane and who run the world on a day to day basis).

Being a genius might sound like fun in theory but living day to day in this world as a genius is a major challenge. Frank Herbert's depiction of Alia in Dune--and how her pre-birth exposure to all of the collective wisdom of her ancestors made her both powerful and an "abomination"--is a very apt metaphor for the struggle a genius faces in controlling/managing the thoughts/wisdom/visions that bless (or afflict) at all hours of day and night.

You may think that Grothendieck was weak because he withdrew from society--but I think that he actually showed a kind of mental toughness that most people will never understand or appreciate. He made immense contributions to society while battling against the way that his mind functioned. It could be argued that World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer faced a similar inner struggle and that Fischer also made immense contributions to the art and science of chess before he too found it necessary to seclude himself from the world.

What is mental toughness? Sometimes, just surviving day to day requires tremendous mental toughness, depending on the internal and external circumstances that a person faces.

Kurt Godel: Mathematician/Philosopher Extraordinaire

If you have heard the name Kurt Godel at all, you probably heard it in connection with Douglas Hofstadter's masterful (and massive) Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Unless you read and remember the contents of that more than 30 year old book, you probably have no idea who Godel was and why his work is so significant.

John W. Dawson's article Godel and the Limits of Logic provides a sensitive and perceptive glimpse at the accomplishments and inner life of one of the most eminent mathematicians of all time. Dawson explains that Godel was a Platonist: "he believed that in addition to objects, there exists a world of concepts to which humans have access by intuition. For Plato, who lived around 400 BC, concepts such as truth were not products of the human mind which can change according to the thinker's point of view, as some philosophers believe, but existed independently of the human observer. Thus, a statement could have a definite 'truth value'--be true or not--whether or not it had been proved or could be empirically confirmed or refuted by humans. Gödel subscribed to this philosophy, and, in his own view, this was an aid to his remarkable mathematical insights."

Mental illness plagued Godel for much of his life and ultimately led to his untimely demise but Godel nevertheless made an indelible impact on mathematics, logic and philosophy. Dawson declares:

Gödel proved that the mathematical methods in place since the time of Euclid (around 300 BC) were inadequate for discovering all that is true about the natural numbers. His discovery undercut the foundations on which mathematics had been built up to the 20th century, stimulated thinkers to seek alternatives and generated a lively philosophical debate about the nature of truth. Gödel's innovative techniques, which could readily be applied to algorithms for computations, also laid the foundation for modern computer science...

Although Gödel's work irrefutably proves that "undecidable" statements do exist within number theory, not many examples of such statements have been found. One example comes from the sentence:

This statement is unprovable
You can see why this is a prime candidate: if you could prove this statement to be true, then it would be false! It is true only if it is unprovable, and unprovable only if it is true. As it stands, this is not a statement about the natural numbers. But Gödel had devised an ingenious way to assign numbers to English-language phrases like this one, so that finding whether the statement is true or not translates to solving numerical equations. He proved that, within the axioms of number theory, it is impossible to prove whether or not the equation corresponding to the sentence above holds true, thus confirming our "common-sense" analysis.

In a similar way, Gödel translated the statement

The axioms of this theory do not contradict each other
into numerical code, and again proved that the translation is unprovable. Any proof that the axioms do not contradict each other--that they are consistent-- must therefore appeal to stronger principles than the axioms themselves. 

The latter result greatly dismayed David Hilbert, who had envisioned a program for securing the foundations of mathematics through a "bootstrapping" process, by which the consistency of complex mathematical theories could be derived from that of simpler, more evident theories. Gödel, on the other hand, saw his incompleteness theorems not as demonstrating the inadequacy of the axiomatic method but as showing that the derivation of theorems cannot be completely mechanized. He believed they justified the role of intuition in mathematical research.

The concepts and methods Gödel introduced in his incompleteness paper are central to all of modern computer science. This is not surprising, since computers are forced to use logical rules mechanically without recourse to intuition or a "birds-eye view" that allows them to see the systems they are using from the outside. Extensions of Gödel's ideas have allowed the derivation of several results about the limits of computational procedures. One is the unsolvability of the halting problem. If you have ever written a computer program, you will know that a programming mistake can cause it to enter an infinite loop: it will run forever and never end. The question is if there can be an algorithm that can examine any computer program and decide whether it will eventually halt or whether it will keep running forever. This is the halting problem and the answer is "no."

Another result that derives from Gödel's ideas is the demonstration that no program that does not alter a computer's operating system can detect all programs that do. In other words, no program can find all the viruses on your computer, unless it interferes with and alters the operating system.

Godel's concepts have wide-ranging implications not only for mathematics, physics and computer science but also for philosophy and metaphysics. David Goodman, writing in First Things, describes Godel's impact as both a mathematician and someone who thought seriously about theological matters:

Kurt Gödel was a believer--or, at least, a knower--whose engagement with God included a reworking of the ontological proof of God’s existence. Born in 1906, Gödel was arguably the great mathematician of his time. Certainly no twentieth-century thinker did more to show that the human mind cannot be reduced to a machine. At twenty-five he ruined the positivist hope of making mathematics into a self-contained formal system with his incompleteness theorems, implying, as he noted, that machines never will be able to think, and computer algorithms never will replace intuition. To Gödel this implies that we cannot give a credible account of reality without God. But Gödel’s God is not the well-behaved deity of the old natural theology, or the happy harmonizer of the intelligent-design subculture. Gödel’s God hides his countenance and can be glimpsed only in paradox and intuition. God is not an abstraction but “can act as a person,” as Gödel once wrote, confronting those who seek him with paradox, uplifting man through glorious insights while guarding his infinitude from human grasp. Gödel’s investigations in number theory and general relativity suggest a similar theological result: that God cannot be reduced to a mere principle of the natural world. Gödel may have seen himself as a successor to Leibniz, whose critique of Spinoza’s atheism set a precedent for much of Gödel’s work.

Rebecca Goldstein's book-length biography Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel further explains Godel's significance: "This man's theorem is the third leg, together with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Einstein's relativity, of that tripod of theoretical cataclysms that have been felt to force disturbances deep down in the foundations of the 'exact sciences.' The three discoveries appear to deliver us into an unfamiliar world, one so at odds with our previous assumptions and intuitions that, nearly a century on, we are still struggling to make out where, exactly, we have landed" (p. 22).

Positivists and postmodernists cite Albert Einstein, Kurt Godel and Werner Heisenberg as three figures who destroyed the concept of objective reality but Einstein and Godel rejected this interpretation of their work. In Goldstein's words, "Einstein interpreted his theory as representing the objective nature of space-time, so very different from our human, subjective point of view of space and time" (p. 42). Similarly, Godel's "commitment to the objective existence of mathematical reality is the view known as conceptual, or mathematical, realism. It is also known as mathematical Platonism, in honor of the ancient Greek philosopher whose own metaphysics was a vehement rejection of the Sophist Protagoras' 'man is the measure of all things'" (p. 44). In layman's terms, "For Godel mathematics is a means of unveiling the features of objective mathematical reality, just as for Einstein physics is a means of unveiling aspects of objective physical reality" (p. 45). Einstein and Godel did not believe that they had thrown the world into chaos but rather that they had used their intellect to decipher the true nature of, respectively, space-time and mathematical reality.

Godel was a member of the famous Vienna Circle of intellectuals who regularly met in the 1920s and 1930s but most of the Vienna Circle's members believed in logical positivism while Godel was a Platonist. However, Godel rarely spoke during these meetings and he was one of the younger members of the group, so it appears that the other members did not even realize that Godel opposed their views. Godel first presented his revolutionary Incompleteness Theorem during a 20 minute talk on "Epistemology of the Exact Sciences" during the second day of a scientific conference in Konigsberg. Godel's work was later described as an "amazing intellectual symphony" but because of his mild-mannered presentation and because of the complexity of his ideas it was not immediately apparent even to the esteemed attendees of this conference that Godel had accomplished something monumental.

On the third day of the conference, Godel summarized the meaning of his Incompleteness Theorem: "One can (assuming the [formal] consistency of classical mathematics) even give examples of propositions (and indeed of such a type as Goldbach and Fermat) which are really contextually [materially] true but unprovable in the formal system of classical mathematics." Goldstein describes this sentence as "meticulously crafted, a miniature masterpiece" (p. 157) but adds, "Godel was always disappointed by the abilities of others to draw the implications he had scrupulously prepared for them, and his experience at Konigsberg must have been a magnificent disappointment, for the response was a resounding silence."

The only person present who grasped the implications of what Godel had said was another towering genius, John von Neumann. Von Neumann spoke with Godel afterwards and Von Neumann later informed Godel--who was then still finishing his doctoral studies--that the implication of what Godel had said was that it is impossible to formally prove the consistency of a system of arithmetic within that system of arithmetic. Godel drily replied that not only did he realize this but he had already drafted the mathematical proof of it (this is known as Godel's second Incompleteness Theorem).

After Godel emigrated to the United States, he shared a close friendship with Einstein, despite being separated in age by nearly 30 years. Einstein so enjoyed their daily walks together on the grounds of the Institute of Advanced Study that toward the end of Einstein's life he told the economist Oskar Morgenstern that his own work did not matter much anymore but he came to the Institute primarily for the privilege of walking alongside Godel each day. Einstein was an outgoing, mentally stable (though highly unconventional) person, while Godel was introverted and battled mental illness throughout his life but they shared in common immense genius and insatiable curiosity: Einstein once said, "The most important thing is to not stop questioning," while Godel was known as "Mr. Why" when he was a child because he constantly asked questions.

In A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein, Palle Yourgrau notes that Godel provided a mathematical solution for Einstein's General Theory of Relativity that demonstrated that in a relativistic universe time travel is theoretically possible. If Godel is correct, then this means that time does not exist, at least not in the linear way that we humans subjectively perceive it, because what is past is not actually past.

Yourgrau laments that mathematicians and physicists have essentially ignored or dismissed Godel's solution even though no one has found any flaw with Godel's math; Einstein disliked the idea that time travel might be possible but he could find no mistakes in Godel's calculations and Einstein admitted that "the problem here involved disturbed me at the time of the building up of the general theory of relativity."

Einstein further stated, "Kurt Godel's essay constitutes, in my opinion, an important contribution to the general theory of relativity, especially to the analysis of the concept of time." However, Einstein questioned whether Godel's model was physically plausible even though it was mathematically and conceptually sound; Godel's theoretical universe rotates and for the remainder of his life after he proposed this solution Godel had a keen interest in whether or not our universe rotates (to this day, astrophysical observations have neither confirmed nor refuted the possibility that our universe may in fact conform to Godel's hypothetical model).

In his younger days, Einstein had questioned other interpretations of general relativity--including the possibility that black holes exist and the possibility that the universe is expanding--on the grounds of being physically implausible only to later be proven wrong. Godel's relentless logic led Godel inexorably to the conclusion that if time does not exist in a theoretically possible universe (such as the rotating universe postulated in his solution to Einstein's General Relativity equations) then it stands to reason that time does not exist in any universe to which General Relativity applies. Physicists and philosophers have mocked Godel's concept for decades but have yet to actually disprove it. We humans subjectively perceive the passage of time but that does not mean that our subjective perception is accurate; Einstein's theory accurately predicted that time passes more slowly as an object is accelerated and thus there is not one universal "now" but rather only various frames of reference, so Godel's suggestion that the passage of time is an illusion is perhaps not so radical a notion as it seems (though, if correct, it does raise an interesting philosophical or perhaps theological question of why our brains are designed/have evolved to believe in the passage of time if the passage of time is actually illusory).

The Einstein-Godel friendship survived any disagreements about theoretical or practical matters and it endured despite differences in age and temperament. While Einstein enjoyed his celebrity status and used his fame as a platform to publicly speak out about a variety of issues, Godel shunned the spotlight and at times seemed stunningly oblivious to anything that did not directly relate to mathematics; during the late 1930s, he innocently asked a refugee scientist who had recently fled the Nazis what had brought him to America. Not surprisingly, many people were not charmed by Godel's singular focus on mathematics to the exclusion of just about anything else. Godel avoided conflict and in time avoided human contact in general (other than with his wife, Einstein and very few others) by utilizing his full-proof escape method: agree to meet a person at a particular place and time and then not show up, thus ensuring that he avoided contact/conflict.

Godel was burdened from an early age with serious psychological problems. He suffered rheumatic fever as a child and when he was a child his research about rheumatic fever revealed that it often causes permanent heart damage. Therefore, Godel concluded that logic dictates that he suffered permanent heart damage, so he spent most of his adult life taking pills for a non-existent heart ailment. Godel also convinced himself that poisonous fumes were emanating from his air conditioner's ducts.

A deep pessimism clouded Godel's thoughts and moods. "We live in a world in which ninety-nine percent of all beautiful things are destroyed in the bud," he lamented. Godel did not believe in the concept of historical progress but instead felt that humanity was regressing: "The world tends to deteriorate. Good things appear from time to time in single persons and events...but the general development tends to be negative."

Taking this concept to what seemed to him to be a logical conclusion, Godel was convinced that there was a conspiracy to rid the world of logical-thinking people and that--as perhaps the foremost logician in the world--he was one of the targets of this conspiracy. Thus, Godel was constantly afraid that his food would be poisoned. Godel's wife Adele allayed those fears by sampling his food first; not long after Adele became too ill to perform this task for him, Godel died of starvation because he refused to eat.

Godel's paranoia is similar to the paranoia exhibited by the great chess champion Bobby Fischer in the sense that both men excelled in disciplines that require the rigorous application of logic and yet, paradoxically, logic failed them in areas outside of their expertise. However, Goldstein does not find Godel's paranoia paradoxical: "Paranoia isn't the abandonment of rationality. Rather, it is rationality run amuck, the inventive search for explanations turned relentless. A psychologist friend of mine put it this way: 'A paranoid person is irrationally rational...Paranoid thinking is characterized not by illogic, but by a misguided logic, by logic run wild" (p. 205).

Goldstein asks a haunting question about Godel that applies equally to Fischer and to other supergeniuses whose strict dedication to misguided logic led them to very dark places: "How can a person, operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?" (p. 204). This is clearly a formidable task even for some of the most brilliant people who ever lived; neither Fischer nor Godel ever figured out how to reason their way out of their particular versions of madness: Fischer's logic extrapolated from the truth that the Soviet Union cheated at chess to create in his mind a vast conspiracy centered on anti-Jewish thought that reached bizarre (but to Fischer completely logical) conclusions such as every single move in every single Kasparov-Karpov game was prearranged; Godel's logic extrapolated from some truths about his early childhood illnesses to some unfounded beliefs about his health and about supposed conspiracies to poison him.

Fischer was only officially the World Chess Champion from 1972-75 but more than 40 years later many people still consider him to be the greatest chess player of all-time. Similarly, Godel published relatively little during his lifetime but because of the depth, quality and influence of what he did publish he has been called the greatest mathematician of the 20th century and perhaps the greatest logician since Aristotle. Godel postulated that the passage of time may be illusory but as long as we humans perceive the passage of time he should and will be remembered as someone who shed some light on the mysteries of the universe.

Further Reading:

1) Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been described as "simply the best and most beautiful book ever written by the human species."

In the 20th anniversary edition of his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Hofstadter explains his original goals and intentions:

GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter...GEB approaches [this question] by slowly building up an analogy that likens inanimate molecules to meaningless symbols, and further likens selves... to certain special swirly, twisty, vortex-like, and meaningful patterns that arise only in particular types of systems of meaningless symbols. It is these strange, twisty patterns that the book spends so much time on, because they are little known, little appreciated, counterintuitive, and quite filled with mystery [that] I call..."strange loops"...

...the Godelian strange loop that arises in formal systems in mathematics... is a loop that allows such systems to "perceive itself," to talk about itself, to become "self-aware," and in a sense it would not be going too far to say that by virtue of having such a loop, a formal system acquires a self.

2) A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein by Palle Yourgrau focuses on Godel's mathematical solution to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and the implication of that solution, namely that in a universe governed by the General Theory of Relativity time travel is possible. As Godel realized, if the past is accessible then this means that the past is not really past and therefore time cannot exist as anything other than an ideal concept in such a universe (i.e., in such a universe there is no real distinction between past, present and future).

3) Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel by Rebecca Goldstein is a very readable yet informative account of Godel's life, though it apparently contains some errors in its descriptions of Godel's work (see below; as I do not have formal, higher level mathematical training I must defer to the experts on this issue).

4) The Incomplete Godel is a review of Yourgrau's book and Goldstein's book by Gregory Moore, a professor of mathematics at McMaster University in Canada. Moore prefers Yourgrau's book to Goldstein's because of several errors he notes in Goldstein's attempts to explain Godel's mathematical work but he states that the definitive Godel biography is Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (A K Peters, 1997), by John W. Dawson, Jr.

5) Time and Causation in Godel's Universe describes some of the practical implications of Godel's concept of a universe in which time travel is possible.

6) The theoretical possibility of time travel presents us with the confounding Grandfather Paradox, which Robert Heinlein memorably explored in his classic short story "'--All You Zombies--.'"

Thoughts on Poshlost and the Defining Arrogance of Genius

In Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40, interviewer Herbert Gold of the Paris Review asked Nabokov, "What is most characteristic of poshlust in contemporary writing? Are there temptations for you in the sin of poshlust? Have you ever fallen?"

Nabokov replied (emphasis added):

“Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany's guilt.” The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name—that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost's favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine Flowergirls” of half a century ago. The list is long, and, of course, everybody has his bête noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple—she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canapé, he admiring wistfully the hostess. And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range.

Nabokov's statement foreshadowed/predicted much of what is wrong not only with contemporary journalism but also with the ideological perspectives that have become very fashionable in certain circles (i.e., equating the actions of President George Herbert Walker Bush with the crimes against humanity committed by Saddam Hussein is not merely inaccurate--it is perverse, or, as Nabokov would say, an example of "poshlost").

Here are some other Nabokov gems from that interview:

The purpose of a critique is to say something about a book the critic has or has not read. Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic's intelligence, or honesty, or both.

---

There is only one school: that of talent.

(Nabokov dismissed the idea that certain Russian poets belonged to different "schools").

---

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only its own self to copy.

*****

Nabokov clearly not only possessed talent and originality but he had a quite keen awareness of the extent of his talent and originality; this is a characteristic feature of genius: while people of lesser talent are often clueless about how their skills compare to those of other people and people of average/slightly above average talent have understandable doubts about their capacity to compete with the truly gifted, geniuses generally possess extreme self assurance--to the point of sounding megalomaniacal or even delusional if their public accomplishments do not measure up to their seemingly grossly inflated opinions about themselves. The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright once declared, "Early in life I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change."

Wright's statement is similar to World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer's reply after being asked who is the greatest chess player: "It's nice to be modest, but it would be stupid if I did not tell the truth. It is Fischer."

Albert Einstein's self confidence went even further than Wright's or Fischer's. Einstein's Theory of Relativity was not confirmed until Sir Arthur Eddington made his famous eclipse observations proving that gravity bends light in the manner that Einstein predicted but Einstein never doubted that his conception of how the universe works is not only correct but also the most elegant way for nature to function. Asked what he would have thought if Eddington's experiment had not confirmed the Theory of Relativity, Einstein replied, "Then I would have felt sorry for the Dear Lord. The theory is correct." Einstein thought that he knew better than God--or at least as much as God--about how the laws of nature should work in terms of mathematical elegance, beauty and simplicity!

There can be a thin line between confidence and self-delusion. The tremendous self confidence possessed by Wright, Fischer and Einstein does not seem delusional to us now because each of those men proved himself to be arguably the greatest practitioner of his craft--but what about George Ohr? Was he a confident genius, a delusional eccentric or some combination of both? Should he be defined by his own descriptions of his abilities, by what his contemporaries thought of him or by the high esteem with which his art is now viewed? Which perspective is true, which perspective is most accurate? If Einstein had lived in an era during which it was not possible to experimentally confirm the Theory of Relativity but he insisted that despite his status as a lowly patent clerk he had glimpsed into the mind of God would it have been correct to view Einstein as a genius or a madman?

I suspect that anyone who ranks well above the 99th percentile in a given endeavor--whether that field is architecture, chess, physics, basketball, writing or anything else--truly believes that he is the best in the world, if not the greatest of all-time. Of course, there can really only be one person who is truly the greatest. Disregarding the difficulty--if not impossibility--of proving who is in fact the greatest, if only one person actually is the greatest are the other nine people who rank in the top 10 delusional for thinking that they are the greatest? Or is that kind of thinking, that perspective about oneself, an essential personality trait for anyone who is trying to scale the very highest of heights?

"Michael Jackson's This is It": Fitting Requiem for an Artistic Genius

I just saw "Michael Jackson's This is It," an entertaining and poignant look at Michael Jackson's last performances: his rehearsals for what he planned to be his final worldwide tour. If Jackson had not died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 50 just days before the tour would have started then we likely would never have seen the rehearsal footage, because it was originally supposed to go into Jackson's private library; I suspect that the perfectionist in Jackson might have been somewhat self conscious about the world seeing him practice but that the part of him that loved his fans would have understood how much it means to them to see and hear him perform his classic hits one last time.

The footage makes it very clear that Jackson still had his singing and dancing chops and that his final tour would have been an ambitious, bold extravaganza, featuring new audio and visual takes on his greatest hits while preserving the essence that made those songs so popular; in one practice session for "The Way You Make Me Feel," Jackson patiently worked with the musical director and other musicians to literally make sure that every single note sounded exactly right. Jackson said that he wanted each note to sound precisely the way that it did on his albums because that is what the fans expect--yet he also jazzed up (or funked up) certain parts of some songs as well, making them sound familiar and yet new at the same time. You don't have to be a musical expert to quickly notice that Jackson not only had a highly tuned ear that detected the subtlest difference between musical notes but also that he was very good at explaining/demonstrating exactly what he expected the other musicians to do. Jackson made his points softly, with a generous sharing spirit; he involved others in the creative process as opposed to simply dictating to them what to do. On several occasions when a dancer or musician messed up, Jackson quietly offered a correction and said, without any evident frustration, "That is why we have rehearsal."

During one segment, Jackson and others worked out the sequence in which various effects would happen. Jackson wanted to give a hand signal as a cue to start one effect, but the director asked Jackson how Jackson would know the right time to give the signal because Jackson would not be able to see when the preceding effect behind him had finished. Jackson thought for a beat, then said that he would know when to make the cue by "feel." That simple reply is a touchstone of his genius and made me think of how a grandmaster once said that Bobby Fischer could throw a chess piece in the air and it would land on the right square: one aspect of genius is an innate "feel" for how something should be done, indeed how it must be done--and yet it is very important to understand that this innate "feel" must be honed by thousands of hours of practice in order to fully blossom. Fischer arguably had the most talent but it is inarguable that he worked extraordinarily diligently.

While it certainly would have been wonderful to see Jackson successfully complete his concert tour, I find it fascinating to get a glimpse of his behind the scenes work ethic; when I go to NBA games one of my favorite things to do is watch the players warm up--not just the cursory warmup that takes place minutes before tip-off but also the practicing that they do before the doors open to the general public: I will never forget watching Reggie Miller's extensive, highly programmed shooting routine, starting with layups and then moving outward progressively. Miller is one of the greatest long-range shooters ever but he practiced layups before every single game! Miller had a tremendous "feel" for shooting but he honed that "feel" with his diligent attention to detail. I only saw Michael Jordan in person twice--once in a preseason game during his first comeback and once in a regular season game during his second comeback--and what struck me most about those two games was the shots that Jordan practiced beforehand: he concentrated mainly on turnaround jumpers in the post/midpost and free throws; Jordan had obviously shot those shots thousands of times previously but he never stopped working on perfecting his touch from his primary scoring areas. Jordan neither wasted time with shots that he would not shoot in a game nor did he neglect to practice any shot that he likely would take. This summer, Kobe Bryant--who has been the most complete player in the NBA for years--worked out with Hakeem Olajuwon to learn low post moves. Jordan, Bryant and Miller could be described as basketball geniuses but they understand that their "feel" for the game must be constantly honed. Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young expresses a similar sentiment when he speaks of the "craft" of quarterbacking.

Jackson worked hard during the rehearsals and yet he seemed to experience great joy; he talked about preserving his voice for the upcoming tour but he could not resist singing through complete songs at full force, much to the delight of the assembled dancers, musicians and work crew--Jackson lightheartedly chided them for giving him so much love that he felt obligated to sing instead of simply walking through the choreography.

Some of Jackson's collaborators seemed understandably star-struck; on a couple occasions, he had to gesture to a dancer to complete a move instead of simply watching what Jackson did. Jackson encouraged everyone to express their talents fully; he told lead guitarist Orianthi Panagaris that a certain guitar solo was her "time to shine" and that she should hit the highest note that she could muster.

Jackson emphasized that he intended for his concert tour to not only entertain but to also spread the important message that we must love each other and we must tenderly care for our ailing planet before it is too late. Music and dance emanate from a place deep within the human soul and that is why the artistry of great musicians and dancers resonates so powerfully. I have always thought that in Jackson's Egyptian-themed "Remember the Time" video the real power rested not with Eddie Murray's Pharoah character--a leader whose mere gesture of disapproval could lead to someone's execution--but rather with Jackson's character (a sort of court jester), because Jackson had the ability to inspire wonder from all those around him; even if the Pharoah's henchmen had captured and killed the Jackson character anyone who had seen him perform for Pharoah would have never forgotten him, so the Jackson character was truly immortal--much like Jackson himself is. In "My Philosophy," KRS-ONE very poetically expressed that creators have enduring power far superior to the power held by political and business leaders: "Who gets weaker? The king or the teacher?/It's not about a salary, it's all about reality/Teachers teach and do the world good/Kings just rule and most are never understood/If you were to rule or govern a certain industry/All inside this room right now would be in misery/No one would get along nor sing a song/'Cause everyone'd be singing for the king, am I wrong?"

Jackson clearly experienced "flow" during these rehearsal sessions. It is our loss that he is no longer with us to continue to create music--and his sister Janet Jackson made a poignant comment shortly after his death when she said that to the rest of the world Michael Jackson is an icon but to her he is family--but it could also be said that Jackson died while doing what he most liked to do and at a time when he was still able to perform at a high level; unlike the last images of a bloated Elvis Presley, who--though still young--had already seen his best days, "Michael Jackson's This is It" shows an artist who still possessed vibrancy, creativity and energy. Jackson's rehearsal performances are achingly beautiful and at times they moved me to tears--tears of joy from watching a great artist in a "flow" state, tears of sadness that he is gone and even tears of relief in the sense that Jackson has been released from the internal demons and external critics who hounded him.

"Michael Jackson's This is It" will only be in theaters for a two week run starting October 28, so if you want to see it on the big screen then you need to act quickly.