could know all there is to know about how great art gets made. In school, whether I was studying history or math or literature, I was almost always taught that great and terrible individuals were at the center of the story. Michelangelo and his ceiling. Newton and the falling apple. Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
To be fair, I was sometimes taught that circumstance played a role in the emergence of greatness. When discussing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school, one of my teachers pointed out that in order for Mark Twain to become Mark Twain, he had to grow up along the river that separated twentieth-century America during the war that separated nineteenth-century America. But mostly I was taught, and believed, that important work was done not by the times or via massive collaboration, but by heroic and brilliant individuals.
I still believe in genius. From John Milton to Jane Austen to Toni Morrison, some artists are just . . . better. But these days, I see genius as a continuum rather than a simple trait. More to the point, I think the worship of individual genius in art and elsewhere is ultimately misguided. Isaac Newton did not discover gravity; he expanded our awareness of it in concert with many others at a time and in a place where knowledge was being built and shared more efficiently. Julius Caesar didn’t become a dictator because he chose to cross the Rubicon River with his army; he became a dictator because over centuries, the Roman Republic became more reliant upon the success of its generals to fund the state, and because over time the empire’s soldiers felt more loyalty to their military leaders than to their civilian ones. Michelangelo benefited not just from improved understandings of human anatomy, and not just from being Florentine at a time when Florence was rich, but also from the work of several assistants who helped paint parts of the Sistine Chapel.
The individuals we celebrate at the center of more recent revolutions were similarly positioned in times and places where they could contribute to faster microchips or better operating systems or more efficient keyboard layouts. Even the most extraordinary genius can accomplish very little alone.
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I’ve often wished—especially when I was younger—that my work was better, that it rose to the level of genius, that I could write well enough to make something worth remembering. But I think that way of imagining art might make individuals too important. Maybe in the end art and life are more like the world’s largest ball of paint. You carefully choose your colors, and then you add your layer as best you can. In time, it gets painted over. The ball gets painted again and again until there is no visible remnant of your paint. And eventually, maybe nobody knows about it except for you.
But that doesn’t mean your layer of paint is irrelevant or a failure. You have permanently, if slightly, changed the larger sphere. You’ve made it more beautiful, and more interesting. The world’s largest ball of paint looks nothing like the baseball it used to be, and you’re part of the reason.
In the end, that’s what art is for me. You paint the ball, which changes the way someone else thinks about painting the ball, and so on, until some guy overwhelmed with grief and dread drives out to Alexandria, Indiana, to see what beautiful foolishness thousands of people have made together, and feels a hope that cannot be explained or shared except by painting. That guy adds a layer of his own to the ball, one that won’t last but still matters. Art is not only a genius going forth, as James Joyce put it, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Art is also picking a light blue for your layer of the world’s largest ball of paint, knowing that it will soon be painted over, and painting anyway.
I give the world’s largest ball of paint four stars.
SYCAMORE TREES
MY CHILDREN LIKE TO PLAY an age-old game with me called Why? I’ll tell them, for instance, that I need them to finish breakfast, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say so that you receive adequate nutrition and hydration, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say because as your parent I feel obligated to protect your health, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say partly because I love you and partly because of evolutionary imperatives baked into my biology, and