I have given them every opportunity. Every type of advancement and profit sharing as well, but they want me in residence. Resident curator! Ah, that sounds brilliant. However, will I take the job? I have finished my Ph.D. and am ready to start teaching. I wish I could take the job. I spent years in Europe with you and Aunt Queen. It was a luxurious journey. I am thoroughly ruined for ordinary life. I would love nothing better than to be curator here, to maintain the Easter and Christmas traditions for the sake of the parish, and whatever else I want, whie earning a high salary, having a gorgeous house and ample time to write a couple of books in my academic field. Some people believe that I have the style and grace to pull it off. Oh, this could be the answer, but I have a few reservations. However, think about it. In my idle hours, I could begin to build a proper library on shelves put on the inside walls of the double parlor. And I could write a short history of Rocklin, to be printed up for the tourists, you know, with architectural details and blueprints and legends and such. Throw in the limousine and driver twenty-four hours a day, and a new car of my own every two years, and a deep-pocket expense account and paid vacations to New York and Tennessee, and I think it would be possible, but only time will tell. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

That homely yearning for simplicity which we have been discovering in ourselves and in the great majority of people who have taken our preference tests has not escaped the hearts of educators any more than of the parents and the children they teach. One sign of it is the immense popularity of the notion that intelligence can not only be measured, but can be expressed in a simple number, with a base of reference something like a dollar—the I.Q. (intelligence quotient), one hundred units of which can be counted upon to indicate that the Lord dealt out to his servant an average number of talents, to be buried or used according to one’s character and personal worthiness, for better of for worse. The enduring vogue of the I.Q. is certainly testament to our natural desire to keep the story simple, and psychologist and teachers have been the worst offenders in supporting this popular simplification. The fact is, of course, that intelligence is a complex set of interrelated aptitudes and abilities, some of them verging closely upon the temperamental rather than being limited to what we usually think of as intellective. Of course, we also have to consider the results of a studies designed especially to discover some of the determinants, other than a simple one-number estimate of intelligence, that are important in the production of the sorts of original perceptions and problem-solutions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

Another study we have seen, employed a wide variety of psychological tests in the usual living-in assessment setting. Both because of the nature of the sample and because of the method employed for discovering significant relationships, several restrictions upon the generalizability of the results must be organized. For one thing, correlation coefficients between the measure of originality and several hundred other variables were computed in a search for significant associations, and the observed correlations have not as yet been checked in any other sample that is this similar to the general population (simply because we changed track and decided to work particularly with a view to discovering the traits of original persons; they had not engaged themselves in work that called for a high order of original thought, nor was originality an important value in their lives. In brief, the correlations to be reported may not reflect anything concerning the way in which highly creative people differ from the norm. The results therefore are germane to the question of how originality varies with other personal characteristics only if originality be considered as a variable that is distributed continuously throughout the general population. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

In spite of these strictures inherent in the design of the study, there is some reason to believe that the results are generalizable to the problem of creative process in the highly original person. In the past, we saw that originality in free-response performance tests is sufficiently consistent across test to be considered a dimension, and that in addition the test dimension itself is related to personality variables which were hypothesized on theoretical grounds to be characteristics of highly original persons. Thus the testing of theory in that respect suggests that generalizable relationships may be discovered in this sample, and perhaps in fact that it particularly favors the finding of valid relationships. The central characteristic of the various indirect expressions of anger is that they create barriers of emotional distance between ourselves and the other person. Thus they keep us from experiencing emotional intimacy. Since, as we have seen, we are very much afraid of the experience of love, it seems likely that we often use these indirect expressions of anger as a way of preserving the safety of distance. Evasion of direct expression of anger thus becomes a tool of our fear of love. Looking at it from the other side, then, expression of anger in indirect ways becomes a means of cheating ourselves of what we most want—the experience of love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

One indirect expression of anger that we sometimes use is apparent indifference. Now, of course, if we are really angry, we are not all indifferent. However, that is the point! We resist letting the other person know that we care enough to let them get under our skins. To express the anger directly would be to risk a genuine encounter. So instead we express our hostility by saying in effect, “You do not matter to me.” One man recalls that, when we felt angry, hurt, and frustrated, as a child on certain occasions, by his mother’s stipulations, he would shout through tears, “I do not care! I do not care!” One can guess that those were rather unsuccessful attempts to appear indifferent! Grievance collecting is another indirect expression of anger in which we store up anger for future use, particularly at times when there is danger of intimacy we fear. So, for example, one woman often countered any expression of love from her husband with something like, “Well, you should have thought of that six years ago when you were off getting drunk at the Ritz Hotel bar, slow dancing with that frisky bleached-blonde tramp, buying her Paris Hiltons (sex on the beach) because she can’t drink whiskey, while I was in the hospital giving birth to your baby!” And this particular weapon in her grievance arsenal is so effective and important that she may never let herself be aware that her husband was so “shook up” by his caring for her and by the possibility of becoming a father (and experiencing love for his child) that he could not face his emotions at the moment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

Often our grievance collecting take less dramatic, but just as effective, form. We may have an almost inexhaustible supply of minor resentments. Probably, if we tried, it would be hard for us to put them all into words, but they provide enough impetus to keep us almost constantly irritable or moody with the other person without bringing about the explosion that might clear away the tension between us and permit some frightening moments of closeness. The quality that above all deserves the greatest glory in art—and by that word we must include all creation of mind—is courage; courage of a kind of which common minds have no conception, and which is perhaps described here for the first time…To plan, dream, and imagine fine works is a pleasant occupation to be sure….However, to produce, to bring to birth, to bring up the infant work with labor, to put it to bed full-fed with milk, to take it up again every morning with inexhaustible maternal love, to lick it clean, to dress it a hundred times in lovely garments that it tears up again and again; never to be discouraged by the convulsions of this mad life, and to make of it a living masterpiece that speak to all eyes in sculpture, or to all minds in literature, to all memories in painting, to all hearts in music—that s the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every moment to obey the mind. And the creative moments of the mind do not come to order…And work is a weary struggle at once dreaded and loved by those find and powerful natures who are often broken under the strain of it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

If the artist does not throw one’s self into his or her work like a soldier into the breach, unreflectingly; and if, in that crater, one does dig like a miner buried under a fall of rock…the work will never be completed; it will perish in the studio, where production becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the death by suicide of one’s own talent…And it is for that reason that the same reward, the same triumph, the same laurels, are accorded to great poets as to great generals. One of the reasons creative activity takes so much courage is that to create stands for becoming free from the bonds to the infantile past, breaking the old in order that the new can be born. For creating external works, in art, business or what not, and creating one’s self—that is, developing one’s capacities, becoming freer and more responsible—are two aspects of the same process. Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom, and that, as we have seen in the Promethean (who stole fire from the Gods), and Adam from the Garden of Eden legends, may involve considerable inner conflict. A landscape painter, whose main problem was freeing himself from ties to a possessive mother, had for years wanted to paint portraits but had never dared. Finally pulling his courage together, he dove in and painted several portraits in the course of three days.  #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

The portraits turned out to be excellent. However, strangely enough, he felt not only considerable joy but strong anxiety as well. The night of the third day he had a dream in which his mother told him he must commit suicide, and he was calling up his friends to say good-bye with a terrifying and overwhelming sense of loneliness. The dream was saying in effect, “If you create, you will leave the familiar, and not create.” It is highly significant, when we see the nature of this powerful unconscious threat, that he could paint no more portraits for a month—until, that is, he had overcome the counterattack of the anxiety which had appeared in the dream. Believing that the Universal Spirit comes to fullest consciousness in mortal’s innermost Self, we strive to cultivate the inner life, knowing that spiritual certainty is the result of an impact on God upon the soul. We seek the witness of the Inner Spirit. There is a presence pervading all, an intelligence running through all, a power sustaining all, binding all into one perfect whole. The realization of this presence, intelligence, power, and unity constitutes the inner nature of the mystic Christ, the indwelling spirit, the image of God. The mind has the possibility of projecting limitless expressions of itself, but each expression is unique and different from any other. Thus the infinite is not divided, but multiplied. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8