Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 10/13/21

To J—,

We often fail to differentiate receptive talents from the creative. A receptive talent can, with greater regularity, do what is their ken, and this means that academic and literary institutions get filled with mediocre talents, these especially nacreous because they mistake their evident success as an indication that they likewise embody their romantic ideal of what it is to be a thinker. Satiety is the final stamp of mediocrity. A creative talent is far likelier to go through periods of intense confusion and is intermittently unavailable to the world. Both stripes of talent can be great or mediocre. When receptivity is mediocre, an appeal to pedigree, to an external indicator of merit, is required for mutual engagement, and so a generation’s creative talents and receptive talents generally look past one another. The receptive talent cannot understand the ways of the creative talent, rather disdaining the unorganized manner of the creative’s life, but can only come to understand, slowly and mistakenly in part, the work of the creative, if it is cogently written. Great receptive talents recognizing great creative talents mark high water marks of creative ages. Our most desired outcomes in the realm of human thought come down, in the final summation, to a paltry few. Under this analysis, it seems that our present age is acutely imbalanced. Our receptive talents are widely mediocre, and their participation in institutional life, augmented greatly by consumer facing technology, only entrenches their opposition to the person of the creative. As much as the creative likes to think of themselves as self-sufficient, much as they may be, the creative nonetheless benefits greatly from a relationship with receptive talents of a similar echelon.

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