Rather than thinking of genius as the triumph of divine will power over fate and average gifts, we would be more accurate in seeing it poignantly as an everlasting effort to get the work right, always leaving room for the nagging doubt that it never was right, never actually made it, didn’t in the end succeed.
This is as true of a modern restless genius like Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, visionary, peripatetic rebel, as it was of Beethoven. I know two contemporary prodigies, the awesomely gifted musician Daniel Barenboim, the brilliant linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky: they could not be more different in their gifts, yet the hallmark of their careers is their unstinting, virtually unstoppable capacity for work. The English poet Alexander Pope rather glibly said that genius is to madness “close allied,” whereas an equally strong, perhaps better case can be made for genius as forced labour, a sort of convict-like return, again and again, to the workbench, studio, desk, easel to try to finish a work whose early inspiration recedes further and further back, and requires almost desperate attempts to give it realisation and permanence. That point is finally arrived at only after much uncertainty and unremitting effort: all along a real doubt gnaws away at one’s confidence, threatening to undermine the work completely. The products of genius are precarious, by no means guaranteed in their outcome, and, alas, derive from often thankless effort. It’s far too much work for most people to be a genius. (Edward Said)
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