JOLLY DAYS

Creativity and Play

I just finished Richard P. Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, a book of anecdotes by a great physicist. The tone of the book was off-putting at first. I felt I was being subjected to a precocious child who had never learned to stop — he needed to delight and impress incessantly — without mercy for his audience. He seemed a tiresome chattering braggart.

Even though this is a book of verbal anecdotes, the conversational tone he adopts is itself a bit over the top — he seemed to want to seen as just another guy — except he won the Nobel Prize for Physics. He delighted in going against type; he loved provocation, feeling safe in that his narrowly focused superior intellect, or friends of his superior intellect, would bail him out if things got too tough. He is something of a dummy about art and its meanings, but his self-assertions still landed him a show of his work. I never could find any online examples of his paintings and drawings so I have to suspend judgment as to how accomplished he was. He didn't seem to have the mindset, the soul of an artist, but he was an intensely creative individual nevertheless.

As I read I changed my mind somewhat about Feynman. Feynman uses his anecdotes as a series of intellectual morality plays. He is explaining values he has and lessons he has learned through conversational stories; he was an inventive individual who loved to solve puzzles. A simple skill which increased exponentially as he aged — the difference between him and most people — he continued to grow; as an adult he was solving problems involving the inner workings of sub-atomic particles. The Feynman diagrams posited that diagrams might be more relevant, even more “true”, than the equations which they were designed to represent; these diagrams have been enormously useful in investigating the mysterious reaches of minute reality.

Feynman was open to the wisdom of the creative spirit: when he was feeling flat, he realized that play, the glue of the exploratory human spirit, had led him to his most serious and productive concerns:

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.