You’re So Smaht

I have a lot to say about this article subtitled, “Roger Ebert and the Decline of Film Criticism,” but it all boils down to this:

What is genius? What makes a person truly valuable and luminous in this world?

For me, genius is at heart a generosity. It is the mind that can process a whirlwind and pass it on to you in a whisper.

The basic cartoon of genius around here is probably Einstein, for instance. I’m looking at my copy of “The World As I See It” right now. Why him?

Here’s why.

“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

I think anybody who has an attachment to nuance and the mechanisms of experience (I guess we can call that poetics) will always struggle with the real, quantifiable relevance of theory. Its efficacy in general. If you’re still reading this, 20 to 1 you’ve got a sermon in your head that’s been rehearsed no less than four zillion times–and goddamn, you and me both are flat tired of it. I think we can leave it at this: you’re right and you have the right to exist.

But don’t ever forget your humility. You are only part of a machine. A goddamn leviathan, maybe. But you’re nothing without every other tooth of every little pinion working every single gear.

I almost never see things from the same angle cinematically as Roger Ebert. But from the very moment I began to understand the profundity of the written word, I thought to myself, “That’s a man doing something important.” And, as I’ve been lucky enough to ripen in both the pre and post-internet world, there isn’t so much levity anymore in my sense that he’s the last Great American Journalist we’ve got; no pretense, big-hearted, and full of grace.