Keeping with my recent nerd theme: Here’s an old post, from my old lengthy blog, abridged by half.
I’ve been thinking about my brilliant buddy Blair lately. Before he passed away, he showed how to overcome the pitfalls of being smart.
Here in Calgary, Blair Petterson was known as the guy who came down from Edmonton for the annual science fiction and fantasy convention. Wearing a business suit, stout, blond and bearded, he was well known, adding so much value by proposing ideas for panels, sitting on panels and chairing panels. He told me he was pleased at getting the audience to participate. It helped that he was so quick with humorous quips. As for me, I would seldom be up on the panel myself, since I didn’t know enough, but I would be in the audience putting up my hand to say things like, (All this talk of funding a moon base by mining H-3 is fascinating, but) “Inquiring minds want to know: What the heck is H-3?” (Helium-3)
Blair told me he was touched that I showed up so often at his panels, because I knew they would be well run: I said, “I’d get good bang for my buck.” He valued how my comments were always so interesting and concise. Naturally: One of my hobbies is “meetings,” and besides, as a news reporter I learned to be concise.
For Blair, one of the joys of going to conventions was how he met so many brilliant sf writers. He treasured how they would engage him in long conversations, as he was brilliant too.
In person he was a decent, good-hearted, earnest man. Never mind the pathetic US slogan, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” I think Blair preferred to make less money than he would as a corporate lawyer because he could have such immediate effect on vulnerable people who needed help.
A common pitfall, I think, for smart young people, for whom success in anything is so easy, is to go chasing money without considering what they truly want to do.
For the really smart people, I think the real danger is not falling into a pit of snobbery —which Blair avoided as surely as he avoided devaluing women— but the almost unavoidable bitterness of being in a smart minority.
I’m thinking of poor guys like Mark Twain. Remember The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Huck slowly journeyed down the Mississippi river while having the mental “adventure” of slowly coming to reason that all of his friends and all of his neighbours —in other words, an entire society— were wrong. Huck came to realize that Nigger Jim deserved to have a life, even if this meant Huck had to break the law against helping runaway slaves and, therefore, go to hell. Poor Twain: Surrounded by people who believed in various prejudices only because, willfully, they would not take the time to think things through. Twain’s life must have been a daily hell.
Like Mark Twain, Blair Petterson was smart and curious: They both thought things through.
Unlike Twain, Blair avoided falling into bitterness at human folly. Me too. Here in Calgary, a decade or two ago, only a few miles from the university, I curiously wandered into a hotel lobby and then into a meeting room. Surprise: I found a large meeting of people, most of them up from High River, having a meeting for a dark purpose: being anti-gay. On some six-foot tables —that’s “tables” plural— at the back were a number of books, presumably published before the war, about how horrible the Jews are. I wish I brought my camera, for I might have put the Jewish Defence League onto those homo-haters. Meanwhile, at the University of Calgary, many students with library cards continued to believe that being gay was a “choice.” I don’t know whether these scholars were simply not smart enough or being willfully ignorant—but I’m not bitter.
I never asked Blair about the worst pitfall really smart young people face, an existential choice: “Should I lower my consciousness, dial down my smartness, stop learning so much?” Not everyone makes the same choice… a choice I find is talked about more in science fiction than in real life. For example, in the sf novel Atlas Shrugged, in a flashback where Dagny Taggart is a child, she wonders aloud if she should try to be more popular by not being so smart and capable. Her friend slaps her.
Forget trying to walk a fine line: I believe it’s best to be expecting too much knowledge, rather than too little, from others. In my last three-person shared house I lived with two much-less-educated sex trade workers. One said grandly she saw me as “knowledge.” They didn’t feel the least bit intimidated by me: I believe it’s best to be without arrogance.
My buddy Blair, good-hearted, never arrogant, must have believed the same things. When I was with him around restaurant staff, store clerks or his cleaning lady I was amused, charmed, even a little embarrassed, at how he would cheerfully expect people to know things, or cheerfully expect people to welcome his enthusiastic explanations. I treasured that aspect of him. I think that, avoiding all pitfalls, he made a splendid accommodation to his being so smart.
The only glimpse he ever gave me of the flip side of his life was one day when we were watching the dubbed version of my anime series Elfen Lied. I said I had checked the subtitles and found the dubbing was wrong: What the students were living in was not a vacant restaurant, it was an inn. Out of the blue Blair said he really appreciated me because, like his fiancé, I never bored him. That was a nice thing to hear, but— a world of boring people? I pushed the thought away.
We were watching the anime dubbed, although true fans insist on watching anime with subtitles, because a) I seldom do subtitles, because I have usually have VHS, and b) Blair’s failing health. His vision had weakened. No books, no subtitles. So, being Blair, he became an enthusiast for audiobooks… A few years ago he had to stop attending conventions.
In September, in the year of our Lord 2011, Blair passed away.
I never asked him what it was like to live in a world of boring people, and now I never will.
… …
Sean Crawford
Calgary
January,
2023
