Creativity (29 page)
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
But with age it is also possible to acquire a greater centrality in the field, or to develop new forms of association, especially with students. George Stigler spends more time on the prestigious journal he is editing; Ravi Shankar is planning the new center for the teaching of traditional music that the Indian government is about to build for him. The anthropologist Robert LeVine has decreased his trips to visit fieldwork sites in Africa, but he spends more time training third-world students. Manfred Eigen leads a giant laboratory in Göttingen, works closely with his twelve Ph.
D. students, and is active in various scientific societies and government agencies.
Relationships with Domains
The last category of answers that respondents gave to the question of what has changed in their life during the past decades has to do with the acquisition of knowledge. Contrary to the previous cases, where positive and negative outcomes were roughly in balance, the 17 percent of the responses that fell into this category were uniformly positive. It seems that the promise of more and different knowledge never lets us down. We can lose physical energy and cognitive skills, we can lose the power and prestige of social position, but symbolic domains remain always accessible and their
rewards remain fresh till the end of life.
Some individuals discovered a broader set of possibilities within the domain they had been pursuing; one example is Nina Holton, who is fascinated with what she has been learning about sculpting in bronze. Some branched into new enterprises related to their past work: Freeman Dyson is now writing about science for the general public as enthusiastically as he used to do active science, and currently has a dual career as a mathematical physicist and a writer. Others discover an entirely new interest: Heinz Maier-Leibnitz writes cookbooks after having been president of the German Scie
nce Foundation.
Still others simply look forward to being able to read more widely and to explore hitherto neglected realms of knowledge. Or they claim that in the past years they have learned to enjoy life more fully.
Often the changes are not so much a matter of aging, or of the person deciding to change, but are dictated by the interaction with the medium, by the logic of the domain itself. The painter Ellen Lanyon describes the evolution of her style in the past decades:
For a lot of my early work, I was labeled a sophisticated primitive because I was doing Chicago street scenes, but they were influenced by Sienese egg tempera painters of the fourteenth century. And consequently there was a certain kind of naive approach to perspective which was also premeditated. I was not naive. I was using a certain style. And in the late forties, that was quite appropriate. It was part of what was going on also in American imagery and especially regional imagery. Then because I moved through a period of time where I wanted to work on a larger scale, I worked wi
th oil paint. And then in the very early sixties, by chance, I started to work from photographs. I worked from old family photographs. I worked from newspapers, sports photographs. I worked from old rotogravures that I found in Italy. And it was all figure painting. It was all nostalgia. You know, at that time to work from photographs was a taboo. I was actually working through the photograph and translating a sort of space or a pattern on the canvas that in its way resembled and was a view, a photographic view, of a particular situation that had occurred. It froze time. It stabilized a situation. Some
of those photographs of the family were of deceased people. And a secondary reason was to take my own personal history, document it, establish it in time, so to speak, and therefore it was out and finished. I could set it aside, and I could go on. And that was a very important thing for me. And so therefore the work changed because imagery changed and moved.
Next I went into the use of acrylics, which by that time were pretty well improved, and one could work with them. And I spent about five years training myself in the use of acrylics. So that now most people don’t even know they’re not oil paintings. In the process of doing that I resolved that I would also change the content. So I made another sort of cerebral decision, and I chose to work with the object, not the still life, but the object. And I went through a whole series of things, and it is at that point that the work became much more, I would say, metaphysical. The objects began to ta
ke on their own life. And it worked through a whole
series that had to do with stage magic, early experiments with physics and chemistry. That started in about 1968, and the work is still involved in that general area. Then animals, birds, insects came in through the stage production. I mean, it all sort of proliferated and moved along.
This quote illustrates well how inexhaustible domains can be. In this case the different media of paint—egg tempera, oils, photographs, acrylics—different art-historical influences, changing emotional priorities, and maturing reflections on experience all interact and provide an endless series of developments that Lanyon can explore throughout her life. It is for this reason that changes in the domain are seen as being always positive; they allow a person to keep being creative even when the body fails and when societal opportunities become restricted.
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It is easy to see why these individuals see age in a more positive light than we may have expected. Every one of them is still deeply involved in tasks that are exciting and rewarding, even if they are ultimately unattainable. Like the climber who reaches the top of the mountain and, after looking around in wonder at the magnificent view, rejoices at the sight of an even taller neighboring peak, these people never run out of exciting goals. The actor Edward Asner expresses the sentiments of the whole group when he says that what absorbs his attention now is
demonstrating that my acting ability is better than it’s ever been, doing it across the board, doing it however and whichever way I can. In as many ways as I can. Radio, commercials, voice-overs, narrations for documentaries, on-stage, TV, films. It doesn’t matter. I thirst to…burst at the seams, eager for the chase.
We asked respondents to tell us what their current challenges were, what goals absorbed their energies more than anything else. All the answers were enthusiastic, describing in great detail the person’s current involvement. It was clear that, like Asner, everyone was still “eager for the chase.” The lone exception only confirmed this con
clusion. Freeman Dyson, the one respondent who had nothing particular to work on at the moment, said that this was therefore a very creative period for him, because idleness was a necessary precursor of a productive burst: “I’m fooling around not doing anything, which probably means that this is a creative period, although of course you don’t know until afterwards. I think that it is very important to be idle. So I am not ashamed of being idle.”
Some individuals, like the columnist Jack Anderson, let the challenge be determined by outside events; he was sure that interesting and important issues would keep coming up and present him with opportunities for involvement:
I always try to make the most important task the one that I am working on. I try to keep motivated by assigning a high priority to whatever it is that I am working on. I do not want to live in the past. I have had a few achievements in the past, but that is done and that is over with and I am glad that I did well. But that does not mean anything today. It is what I do today and what I do tomorrow that is important.
This kind of future orientation was typical. There was very little reminiscing and dwelling on past success in this group; everyone’s energies were focused on tasks still to be accomplished.
The most frequent challenge was working on a book and writing of four or five articles during the next year. Some had outstanding research agendas to complete. A good example is the answer of Isabella Karle, whose esoteric technical jargon cannot entirely disguise the excitement bubbling under the surface of her quest:
Well, right now, I’m studying a peptide system that makes channels in cell membranes, and it transports potassium ions from one side of the cell to the other. I am collaborating in this work with a man in India. He has been able to isolate and purify—I say this because many natural products come in many slightly different versions, and unless you can separate out these various different versions, you can’t grow a crystal because it won’t repeat properly, and a crystal has to have the molecules repeat in a certain fashion. He has prepared the materials and he has grown the crystals. In
fact, the same material grows somewhat different crystals from different
solvents. And I’m now looking at the third crystal form. Each one of them shows how a channel is formed. There is a helical peptide. The peptide has a big bend in it, and two peptides come together in an hourglass fashion like so. [She gestures.] They are hydrophobic on one side. That means that they are compatible with the kind of materials that make up cell walls. On the inside, they’re hydrophilic, that is, they attract water or polar substances. So this channel in the crystal, in all the crystal forms, is filled with water, but it is interrupted in the middle by a hydrogen bond between tw
o moieties, so that if you had a water molecule, it would not go through the middle of it, through the midportion. These materials are used as antibiotics, and that’s how they perform their work. Well, it’s very important in biochemistry, biophysics, to try to figure out how ions are transported because our bodies do that in all kinds of ways for all the foods that we eat, the minerals that we need.
Another answer that suggests the multifaceted nature of these people’s commitments is the schedule Rosalyn Yalow describes for her recent past, a schedule in which scientific research, policy making, family times, and public service are all intertwined:
Well, let’s see, on the 24th of February I lectured at Memorial Hospital here in New York City, and then at four and at six I met with women in science at Mount Sinai Hospital; then I went to the Eastern students’ research meetings in Miami, and then I gave endocrine gland rounds the next day. Then I came home [to New York City] and I went to Auburn University where I lectured and interacted for three days; then I went to the Pittsburgh conference, which is on spectroscopy, and then to an analytical chemistry meeting in New Orleans. I came back and then I went to the Stewart Country Day Sch
ool and I spoke to their seventh to twelfth graders; then I went to Albany—all of this in the same week.
Yesterday I spoke at New York Academy of Science to their high school gang. Next week I am going out to Lawrence Liver-more Laboratories in California. I am on the advisory committee for Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. But I am giving a radiation lecture and I am speaking to the women’s group.
Then I go to see my daughter and her husband and my grandchild, and I come back on the 29th. On the 31st I leave to go to Nashville, where I am speaking at Vanderbilt for two days and then two days at the University of the South at Sewanee. Then I go back to California. The American Chemical Society is having a three-day symposium for which they borrowed my title “Radiation Society.” I get back from there and then I am going out to Las Vegas for the American College of Nuclear Physicians, for some sort of meeting on radiation.
For those like Barry Commoner, George Klein, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, and Enrico Randone, who had been responsible for institutions—a business, a research lab—the main challenge is to continue helping the institutions survive. Here is what Robert Galvin says about his continued involvement with Motorola:
Having given up the direct and operating leadership of our corporation, I wish to remain fully active and influential in our institution. I am putting an incrementally greater amount of attention on those factors that I think will have leverage impact on the performance of the institution in the decades ahead, not just the weeks and months ahead. I think there are some significant fundamentals that show promise of allowing a commercial institution to elevate its performing capabilities. One of them that is on the Class A list for me is the vocational skill of creativity, the potent
ial for changing the quality of leadership, which relates to the functions of anticipation and commitment.
Some people have found unanticipated challenges thrust upon them, as it were. Jonas Salk was planning to devote himself to science policy and philanthropy when the AIDS epidemic intruded on the world. Salk found the challenge too compelling to resist; he went back into the lab to try to find some immunological means to prevent the disease, just as he did with the polio vaccine many decades earlier. A dozen years after retiring from a faculty position at the University of Chicago, Bernice Neugarten felt so distressed by reading statistics about the plight of poor children that she r
eturned to doing policy research full-time.
The dedication may be interpreted by some as workaholism, an
obsessive inability to enjoy any other aspect of life except achievement. But this would be missing the point. For most of them work is not a way to avoid a full life, but rather is what makes a life full. The television producer Robert Trachinger shows the multifaceted nature of this process:
I really want to enjoy life now. I’ve kicked back. I’ve always been a very hard worker, A-type personality. I used to have high blood pressure problems and take pills. Now I don’t have to take pills anymore. I do some yoga, I do some tai chi. Teaching remains my great love because I get so much love and response from students, so much caring. That’s important to me because the lonely ghetto kid is still very much a part of me. I have enough money now to live comfortably without working, or without teaching for that matter. I enjoy going to Europe and teaching young people in Europe, an
d consulting with the schools that I’m beginning to set up, departments of television and filmmaking. And I caution them about buying into our form of television because it’s kind of cultural imperialism. Most of what they watch on television in Europe is American television, and it erodes their cultures. So we talk about these values. How do you develop responsible filmmakers and television makers who are not out simply to titillate audiences and make bucks?
I’m going to school. I attend great books courses, and I’m fascinated by reading. If you came upstairs, I have easily fifteen hundred to two thousand books, many of which I’ve not read, but I hope as I get older I’ll read, and I’ll have more and more time to read. And I counsel young people. I am not a sage by any means, but I’ve lived sixty-seven years, and there are some things I do sense and do know. Caring is a good feeling, and we’ve lost our appetite for it.
