Casual Genius
On a phenomenon that I have always admired
The world is full of extraordinary people and their achievements. Some of these are natural aspirations of the human race like singing, or music in general, or running. While others are somewhat more artificial or made up like playing tennis or juggling. Whatever the endeavor there are people who spend a large portion of their lives practicing, getting better at it, and they gravitate towards these endeavors at a young age distinguished by their superior abilities, their ‘genius’.
The above is not new and we are all aware of the phenomenon. A young Mozart apparently composed, “Twinkle, twinkle little star”, tune and all, at age 4 and dazzled audiences with his ability to play the piano. Novak Djokovic was a gifted skier already at age 10 and was touted to be an Olympic skiing champion before picking up a tennis racket around age 12.
What I would like to highlight is something even beyond this genius. It is the seemingly effortless genius of such a person in complete mastery of their chosen field or getting to the top of another field entirely. A kind of casual genius that transcends fields. It is truly impressive to behold and I will put down a few examples that have stayed with me over the years.
Before I go into my chosen examples I will also address a question that came up when a couple of keen readers read a draft of this article. They agreed that the examples below were interesting (to some) and even inspiring, but they asked me why I was writing about this. Past articles tied the subject to something that affected me personally or professionally, whether it was food or the movies or education or travel. What do random geniuses have to do with my life. I don’t know, to be honest. I suppose I am deeply fascinated by many things and when I have experience in something (the game of squash or acting or typesetting) and then I see someone do that thing in the most extraordinary way, well, it makes me just stop and stare in total admiration. Like the first time I saw a live tango performance by ballroom dance champions or when I was mesmerized at a live performance of the Indigo Girls or when I walked into a German stationery store filled with beautiful fountain pens and gorgeous paper. I am in awe of excellence and what I describe below is excellence beyond par.
Hashim Khan: The sport of squash is played in an enclosed space, where two players pound a small rubber ball against a wall. It is similar in its setup to the American sport of racketball, but crucially the ball in squash is smaller and only partially filled with air. This makes the actual game totally different than racketball; the ball in squash remains where it lands rather than pinging around as in racketball. This makes the sport much more cerebral where one has to outthink one’s opponent rather than outrun them by chasing a ball mindlessly like one does in racketball. Squash is a remarkable sport, testing one’s fitness and mental acuity when one is drop dead tired.
The sport of squash came from a game called ‘rackets’ invented in France in the 1600s and then played in English prisons in the 1800s (a squash court does look like a large prison cell) graduating to the elite prep school, Harrow. The English developed the sport and introduced it to the colonies. Around the time India and Pakistan gained independence from England in 1947, Hashim Khan was in his thirties. He had grown up as a ‘marker’, a kind of ball-boy running around squash courts, picking up after the English elite at their clubs. There he picked up playing the sport, but could only really play seriously, with help from the English, around the 1940s. He went on shortly after to win the British Open (at the time, the only world level event in squash and considered the height of the sport) 6 times in a row (1951—1956) and again in 1958. The Khan dynasty dominated the sport for the next 40 or so years winning the majority of titles and championships. The most extraordinary achievement was by Jahangir Khan, son of Roshan Khan (who won the British Open in 1957), who dominated the sport like no one else: he won 555 straight matches from 1981—1985, a record simply unmatched in any professional sport ever. (Jahangir Khan also won 6 World Championships and 10 British Open titles and is considered by many to be the greatest athlete of all time.)
Hashim Khan changed the game, by simply returning every ball from his opponent, and seemingly never getting tired. He was also a true gentleman and very much a spokesperson for the sport. Much later in his life, having settled in Colorado, he would tour various clubs and play anyone who wanted to play with him. It is here that I would like to highlight his absolute mastery of the sport and his ‘casual genius’. Hashim would ask who was the club’s foremost player, usually called the “club pro”, and then proceed to play this person with one variation: he would tell the club pro that he, Hashim, would hit every ball using only the side (edge) of the racket, no strings. Imagine turning the racket in your hand 90 degrees and the roughly 1 inch edge where the strings loop around is the only surface you can see; this is the playing surface Hashim would use to hit the ball. Legend has it that he never lost even playing so. My great regret is that I never saw this in person, but apparently a smiling Hashim would decimate most of the amateurs in this manner.
Emma Thompson: We all watch movies and TV and are duly entertained. Given the ease with which we are able to see a variety of shows or movies we tend to forget the amount of talent required to be cast in these shows. Like anything else in life there are shows and characters that are astonishingly bad (I recommend watching, or at least trying to watch, the movie “Timeline”, a veritable train wreck of dreadful storytelling and terrible acting). That said many characters indelibly stay with us. Like Joe Pesci or Marisa Tomei in “My Cousin Vinny” or Al Pacino in “Insomnia” (I have to say, though, that I find Al Pacino’s acting to be uneven. When people claim that he is amazing in some movie, I find that he is mostly shouting which tends to get confused for good acting. Example: “Scent of a Woman”)
As some readers know I refer to movies all the time and they have played an important role in my life. Thus, I am particularly on the lookout for great actors, the kind that move me. But a truly great actor can slip in and out of different skins and make it look effortless, an absolute mastery of the craft, a ‘casual genius’ at work. An easy example is Daniel Day-Lewis, whether he skips into the role of Abraham Lincoln as though easing into a bespoke suit or showing obsession in There Will Be Blood, he is jaw-dropping to watch in any role. There are other very good actors although they tend to find roles that show their greatness rather than simply pull the role to them (Tom Cruise comes to mind as mind).
That said the height of this casual genius in acting can be witnessed over and over by watching Emma Thompson, arguably the greatest actor (or actress, if you wish) of all time. From roles playing an ordinary person (“Love Actually”) or a loopy mad woman spouting prophecies (“Harry Potter”) or the head of an alien hunting agency played very much tongue-in-cheek (“Men in Black”) or just pretending to be herself but confessing that she is actually from Ohio with a put-on English accent (“Will & Grace”, TV episode); this is watching complete mastery of the craft. I am grateful to be able to watch and appreciate this.
Dennis Ritchie: While some may have heard of Hashim Khan and many more would know Emma Thompson I doubt most readers know the name Dennis Ritchie. In the 1960s there were several revolutions underway in the fields of electronics and computer science. The invention of the transistor completely changed the hardware architecture of computers, while the creation of the computer language Lisp introduced the notion of beauty, logic and computational complexity in the study of algorithms and programming (I am partly lying, of course, since these were all developing concurrently). The microprocessor was created by Ted Hoff (and others) in or around 1972. Against this backdrop, in the so-called Bell Labs, the computer research wing of AT&T, two computer scientists created the Unix operating system and the C programming language arguably the most important bits of software architecture of pretty much all the computers in the world. They were Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
Dennis Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967 but was also finishing his PhD dissertation at Harvard on, “Computational Complexity and Program Structure”. He never actually received his PhD degree for reasons not fully explained even today (and is itself a curious and captivating mystery). But he did type it up carefully and this is what I want to focus on here. Not to lose the forest for the trees, I am in awe of Dennis Ritchie the computer scientist and all that he made possible today from his work, but I want to point out his genius extending to something as mundane and ignored as typesetting. In 1969, there were no word processors, only typewriters and the most modern one at the time was the IBM Selectric, an electric typewriter whose innovations included keeping the paper in place while the ‘typeball’ moved. Most people who wrote dissertations or papers would hire a professional typist to handle superscripts, subscripts, Greek letters etc. Most authors avoided mathematical expressions, subscripts or superscripts as much as possible since the line printers of the day could not handle them. The normal way was to print without, then add these by hand, something you can witness if you read texts or papers from that time.
Ritchie’s thesis is 180 pages of dense mathematical expressions with subscripts or superscripts up to three levels deep typed on a fixed width typewriter, 12 characters per horizontal inch and double spaced at 6 lines per vertical inch. And typed with astonishing precision, so much so that a recent paper examined and tried to recreate what he might have done (using a similar typewriter). The authors were left confounded; we still don't know how he achieved some of what he typed. This included fractional horizontal spacing, vertical positioning, Roman numerals, the notoriously problematic “+” symbol as well as Greek characters (which mathematicians are very fond of). All typeset with absolute precision. How did he do it? A delicious mystery and proof of Ritchie’s enduring genius.
Of course there are more examples of this phenomenon with names such as Nikola Tesla or Linus Pauling. Tesla invented the radio (no, it wasn’t Marconi; he claimed credit long after Tesla had demonstrated its use) and also alternating current, the cornerstone of all electricity use on our planet, and then turned down royalties on his invention since that would have bankrupted Westinghouse Electric and possibly the United States. Linus Pauling would have won three Nobel Prizes, but lost out on one because of timing (he was weeks behind Watson and Crick in nailing down the structure of DNA, and didn’t have the benefit of a thief like Maurice Wilkins stealing the X-ray crystallographic images of Rosalind Franklin). And, perhaps the greatest of such transcendent geniuses was probably Leonardo da Vinci: artist, inventor, mathematician, as well as using transcending fields (such as applying his artistic skills to draw precise diagrams of anatomy).
More than anything I am grateful that I can admire and appreciate such talent and excellence in all things.