For anyone who has felt a little bruised by our world’s insistence on specialisation, here’s a powerful antidote in the current issue of More Intelligent Life (a sibling of The Economist), celebrating those of us who like to spread ourselves around, intellectually speaking. Despite its doomsday title (“The Last Days of the Polymath”), the article extolls the benefits to cultural history of those thinkers who are bored by a career-long focus on one field. Playwright/scientist/Paul Klee collector Carl Djerassi puts it this way:

I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity. To me, promiscuity is a way of flitting around. Polygamy, serious polygamy, is where you have various marriages and each of them is important.

I’ve often felt like a freak because of my diverse interests, but I’m convinced it keeps my brain engaged with my environment (social, political, cultural) and helps me connect otherwise disparate or discrete ideas. Writing and editing, philanthropy projects, jazz music reviewer/aficionado, competitive tennis player, pianist; these hardly strike me as an especially eclectic, impressive or unusual collection of interests. At best, I’m told I’m a Renaissance woman; at worst, I continually fail to answer the question that’s most often posed to me: “So what is it that you do?” In Djerassi’s scheme I would be considered more of a dabbler, I guess, but even in my professional life I am always wearing at least two hats - literary and philanthropic – and that causes enough confusion as it is.

The article ends with Isaiah Berlin’s famous quote about the thinkers of the world, which he divided into foxes and hedgehogs:

Foxes, he wrote, know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule.

The article in More Intelligent Life led me to Project Polymath, which is a not-for-profit aiming to train a new generation of Renaissance thinkers. I would love to hear from foxes and hedgehogs alike.

Here are the winners in The Washington Post’s annual neologism contest. I am having trouble choosing a favourite from this witty bunch:

1. Coffee (n.) the person upon whom one coughs. 
2. Flabbergasted (adj.) appalled over how much weight you have gained. 
3. Abdicate (v.) to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. 
4. Esplanade (v.) to attempt an explanation while drunk. 
5. Willy-nilly (adj.) impotent. 
6. Negligent (adj.) describes a condition in which you absent-mindedly answer the door in your nightgown. 
7. Lymph (v.) to walk with a lisp. 
8. Gargoyle (n.) olive-flavored mouthwash. 
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller. 
10. Balderdash (n.) a rapidly receding hairline. 
11. Testicle (n.) a humorous question on an exam. 
12. Rectitude (n.) the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists. 
13. Pokemon (n) a Rastafarian proctologist. 
14. Oyster (n.) a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms. 
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.) (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there. 
16. Circumvent (n.) an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

In another contest, the newspaper asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. The winners are:

1. Bozone (n.) The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. 
2. Cashtration (n.) The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
3. Giraffiti (n) Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
4. Sarchasm* (n) The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
5. Inoculatte (v) To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
6. Hipatitis (n) Terminal coolness.
7. Osteopornosis (n) A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
8. Karmageddon (n) It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.
9. Decafalon (n.) The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
10. Glibido (v) All talk and no action.
11. Dopeler effect (n) The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
12. Arachnoleptic fit (n.) The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
13. Beelzebug (n.) Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
14. Caterpallor (n.) The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you’re eating.

*To broaden this beyond sarcastic wit, I suggest ironiclastic/ironiclasm would work well.

Here’s a beautiful Pablo Neruda poem I heard for the first time this weekend at a friend’s literary gathering in Sydney. It’s an untitled work from the volume Absence and Presence, translated by Alastair Reid and featuring photographs by Luis Poirot, which was published by Norton in 1990.

I love the audacity of this poem, its challenge for those who live with loss to cast off melancholy, and its suggestion that the suffering of the living is like a second death for the one who is absent. A timely reminder for all of us, certainly for me. For those readers of my book who have written to me recently, perhaps this poem will help. I thank you for sharing your thoughts and wish you well.

If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south lift your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don’t want my heritage of joy to die.
Don’t call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air.
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.