Chapter 4

Imagine the World as Does a Child

On the evening of June 1, 1816, rain and lightning crashed down on the Villa Diodati on the south shore of Lake Geneva.¹ A group of British expats and fledgling geniuses had gathered for dinner and, inspired by the storm, they took up a dare: each would write a ghost story. Invited by Lord Byron, the guests included Percy Bysshe Shelley, his paramour Mary Godwin (later Shelley), her half sister Jane, and Dr. John Polidori. All were well under thirty years of age. Byron, the prototypical Romantic genius, had a reputation for being passionate, rebellious, self-absorbed, and brilliant. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” was the way Lady Caroline Lamb characterized him—after all, Byron had had an affair with his half sister. Percy Shelley was in the process of publishing his way into the pantheon of poetic greats known today as the English Romantics. Polidori would later write the short story “The Vampyre” and thereby put Dracula onto the literary map. But of the illustrious attendees, the one who has had the most lasting impact on the Western psyche and pop culture is Mary Godwin Shelley. That night, she began to imagine the first twitches of Frankenstein. She was only eighteen.

With Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley helped create a new literary genre, the Gothic horror novel, a combination of the phantasmagorical and the murderous, whose progeny would later include other influential works, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Phantom of the Opera. The impact of Frankenstein on culture today, however, has less to do with Shelley’s novel and more with the many films derived from it, including the Edison Manufacturing Company’s 1910 Frankenstein and the definitive 1931 Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff.² The monster who lumbered into pop culture, however, differs significantly from Shelley’s original Frankenstein.

Today, scientists are paying renewed attention to Mary Shelley’s original message: beware the law of unintended consequences.³ In Part II of Shelley’s novel, Dr. Victor Frankenstein utters the following words, having been warmed, then suddenly burned, by the embers of a fire: “How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!”⁴ Frankenstein was a creative genius who had the intent of advancing human knowledge. So, too, were Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and James Watson and Francis Crick. The moral dilemma of Frankenstein—the need to weigh the positives of scientific discovery against the potential negatives and impose ethical standards—foreshadowed similar dilemmas that would be faced by Frankenstein’s real-world descendants regarding atomic energy, global warming, and genetic editing.

HOW DOES A TEENAGER WITH NO FORMAL EDUCATION AND NO PUBLICATIONS to her name deliver a moral lesson for the ages couched within a terrific story? How does someone from a seemingly stable, upper-middle-class home come to know of the dark side, “the mysterious fears of our nature”? And why, despite all the efforts of her later novels, was Mary Shelley never able to duplicate the success of her nineteenth year? The answer has to do with childlike imagination and adult reality.

No genius is an island; no idea is born ex nihilo. As a child of an upper-middle-class environment, Mary Godwin read widely, knew all about Ben Franklin’s kite-flying experiment, and attended public lectures on chemistry and electricity, including discussions of Luigi Galvani’s discovery of animal electricity. She was also rebellious and at sixteen ran off with Percy Shelley to Europe. Descending the Rhine River, the two impressionable youths passed within twenty miles of Frankenstein Castle and may have heard folktales about frightening events occurring thereabouts. From this experience she surely derived her character’s name. But none of these external influences can account for the shocking originality of Frankenstein.

Instead, we must turn to Mary Shelley herself. In the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, the author responded to a request from her readers to explain “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” In response, she said, “As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to ‘write stories.’ . . . but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age, than my own sensations.” She delighted in forming “castles in the air” and “imaginary incidents.”⁵

Young Mary was an experienced writer, but only in her own imagination. A few evenings after that famous dark and stormy night near Geneva, she was privy to a discussion between Byron and Shelley about galvanization and the electrical experiments of Erasmus Darwin (a grandfather of Charles). She then went to bed but not to sleep. Instead she was held captive by her imagination in what she called “a wakeful dream.”

When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student [Frankenstein] of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man [the Creature] stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. . . . He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still. . . . I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story, my tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!

Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”

THE ALCHEMY OF A FEW CHILDHOOD MEMORIES, A RECENT DISCUSSION, childlike night terrors, and a shockingly vivid imagination worked to produce the most powerful horror novel and moralistic fable in literary history. What started as a dare progressed to a short story and then, over the course of ten months, into a full-blown novel. Frankenstein was published on New Year’s Day 1818, with a first printing of five hundred copies, and it was generally reviewed favorably. No less a figure than Sir Walter Scott commented on the author’s “original genius.”⁶ The first edition of Frankenstein was published anonymously, with a preface written by Percy Shelley. Many critics assumed that such “original genius” could spring only from the mind of a man and thus attributed the novel to Percy himself. Mary Shelley wasn’t credited as author until the publication of the book’s second edition in 1823.

Fast forward to 1990. An imaginative young woman, Joanne Rowling, boarded a train in Manchester, England, heading to London. As she described the experience:

I was . . . sitting there thinking of nothing to do with writing and the idea came out of nowhere, and . . . I could see Harry very clearly: this scrawny little boy, and it was the most physical rush of excitement—I’d never felt that excited about anything to do with writing. I’d never had an idea that gave me such a physical response. So I’m rummaging through this bag to try and find a pen or a pencil or anything. I didn’t even have an eye-liner on me, so I just had to sit and think, and for four hours—’cause the train was delayed—I had all these ideas bubbling up through my head.⁷

What followed was a five-year journey between the imagining of the Harry Potter story and the completion of the first book, and they were not easy years for Rowling. She moved to Porto, Portugal, and from there to Edinburgh, Scotland, where, as a single mother of an infant daughter, she lived on welfare. “Let’s not exaggerate here, let’s not pretend I had to write on napkins because we couldn’t afford paper,” she has said. But she did live on a benefit check of ₤70 (about $130) a week, writing partly in her one-room flat but mostly in a local café called Nicolson’s. Eventually, “after a large number of rejections,” she found a publisher for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: Bloomsbury Press in London. Barry Cunningham, her editor at Bloomsbury, recalled in a 2001 BBC interview that, although Rowling had written only a single book, she had imagined the essence of the entire project. “And then she told me about Harry Potter—all through the entire series. . . . I realized, of course, that she knew exactly about this world and where it was going, who it was going to include, how the character would develop, and of course it was fascinating because this doesn’t normally happen.”⁸

The twenty-four-year-old Rowling could imagine great swaths of a fantasy world populated by youthful heroes and heroines. What she imagined went on to become one of the greatest successes in publishing history, generating not only books but also films, a play, a Broadway musical, and two fantasy theme parks, both called “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.” The link between the geniuses Mary Shelley and J. K. Rowling: both were young and imaginative, and both were afraid of things that went bump in the night.

AT WHAT AGE DOES A CHILD REALIZE THAT THE MONSTERS IN HER dreams or in movies and books are not real? Does the adult imperative to “grow up” encourage the loss of creative imagination? Neither Mary Shelley nor Joanne Rowling later surpassed the imaginary power she had displayed at ages eighteen and twenty-four, respectively. The rapper Kanye West spoke to this point in his 2010 single “Power.” Beginning with a reference to the “purity and honesty” of “childlike creativity,” he went on to include this couplet: “Reality is catching up with me/Taking my inner child.”

Pablo Picasso initially lost custody of his inner child and had to work to get it back. “Every child is an artist,” he said. “The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.”⁹ Picasso contended that as a child he was preternaturally skilled at drawing, much like an adult. In fact, before the age of fourteen he could create realistic masterpieces. “When I was a child I could paint like Rafael,” he said, “but it took me a lifetime to paint like a child.” Atypically, Picasso’s childhood works were not of the naive and playful sort. Creative play had been denied him by his mentor/teacher/father, José Ruiz, who had compelled his gifted son to create great art by copying the canonic masters, rather than allowing his imagination to run freely. “I had never had a childhood that was anything but a miserable effort at trying to be an adult,” Picasso said.¹⁰ “What one can consider an early genius is actually the genius of childhood. It disappears at a certain age without leaving around traces. It is possible that such a child will one day become an artist but he will have to begin again from the beginning. I did not have this genius, for example. My first drawings could not have been hung in a display of children’s work. These pictures lacked the childlikeness or naiveté. . . . At the youthful age I painted in a quite academic way, so literal and precise that I am shocked today.”¹¹

Picasso seems to have destroyed almost all his childhood work. As he told it, he was forced to skip his artistic childhood but gradually willed upon himself the childlike imagination that provided a catalyst for later creative innovation. Critics such as Gertrude Stein found in Picasso’s earliest Cubist works (1907) attempts to see and draw as children do, reducing art to the elementary forces of line, space, and color.¹² Later, around 1920, when Picasso entered his neoclassical period, he painted figures with cartoonishly large limbs, hands, and feet. That style Picasso attributed to a recurring childhood dream: “When I was a child, I often had a dream that used to frighten me greatly. I dreamed that my legs and arms grew to an enormous size and then shrank back just as much as in the other direction. And all around me, in my dream, I saw other people going through the same transformations, getting huge or very tiny. I felt terribly anguished every time I dreamed about that.”¹³ As Picasso said with his typical oxymoronic wit, “It takes a very long time to become young.”

MARY SHELLEY, JOANNE ROWLING, AND PABLO PICASSO WERE ALL visionaries who hit hidden targets. Embedded in the words “visionary” and “imagination” are “vision” and “image.” Picasso saw in images; Rowling saw a narrative attended by images; Shelley had a vision she expressed through words. Albert Einstein also saw things.

According to his own testimony, Einstein had a “bad memory for words and texts.” Rather than seeing the physical world, as do most physicists, in abstract symbols and formulas, he literally envisioned it, using his very good memory for pictures and imaginary moving objects. “I very rarely think in words at all,” he said. “A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.”¹⁴

In his autobiography, Einstein tried to explain the complex process of his imagination at work. For Einstein a sequence of “memory pictures” (Erinnerungsbilder) formed a “working tool” or “idea” that could later be expressed as mathematical formulas or as words. “I think that the transition from free association or ‘dreaming’ to thinking is characterized by the more or less preeminent role played by the idea. It is by no means necessary that an idea be tied to a sensorily cognizable and reproducible sign (word); but when this is the case, then thinking becomes thereby capable of being communicated.”¹⁵ Einstein called this mode of pictorial thinking first a “free play with ideas” and then simply “play” (Spiel).

From Einstein’s mental play with images emerged his famous thought experiments. One came at age sixteen when, as he recalled, “I made my first rather childish experiments in thinking which had a direct bearing on the Special Theory [of relativity].”¹⁶ What would the world look like if it were possible to grab on to a ray of light and travel at its speed? Several years later, as a young man walking between his apartment and his job at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, Einstein daily passed the famous clock tower of that city. What would be the result, he wondered, if a streetcar sped away from it at the speed of light? (The clock would appear to have stopped, but a watch on the streetcar would keep on ticking, a point again pertinent to his Theory of Special Relativity.) Then, at about age twenty-six, Einstein imagined a person and things falling from a building at the same time; if the falling person saw only those things, would she perceive herself as falling? (No, all would be perceived as being at rest.) Later, when Einstein had his own children, he tried to explain the world to them using a childlike way of seeing things. Thus he expressed his great insight that gravity was the curving of the fabric of space-time (General Relativity) to his younger son, Eduard, with these words: “When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a curved branch, it doesn’t notice that the track it has covered is indeed curved. I was lucky enough to notice what the beetle didn’t notice.”¹⁷

Einstein was able to imagine the world as a child while keeping apposite scientific information in mind. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” would say of Einstein, “There was always in him a powerful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn.”¹⁸ Einstein frequently cited the connection between creativity and a childlike mind. In 1921, he wrote to a friend, Adriana Enriques, “The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”¹⁹ And finally, toward the end of his life, he expressed it this way: “We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”²⁰

The Magic Kingdom, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Adventureland—these are all fantasy worlds to which parents take their children to intensify and perhaps rekindle the sense of wonder of both parent and child. As imagined by the author J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan was the boy who refused to grow up; he lived in London but often flew to the fantasy world of Neverland. Michael Jackson modeled his life on that of Peter Pan, and he, too, chose not to grow up. (The dark side of Jackson’s world was explored in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, which focused on the artist’s sexual abuse of two boys.) As Jackson once said to the actress Jane Fonda, “You know all over the walls of my room are pictures of Peter Pan. I totally identify with Peter Pan, the lost boy of Never-Never Land.”²¹

By coincidence, when, in 1983, Michael Jackson first set eyes on the property that would become the Neverland Ranch, he was in the company of Paul McCartney. The two were collaborating on a music video, and ultimately Jackson would buy the copyrights to the lyrics of 251 Beatles songs. In terms of money earned in pop or classical music—a barometer of musical influence—the Beatles rank number one; Michael Jackson is number three. Jackson wrote his greatest hits before the age of twenty-three; nothing he did thereafter matched the musical or commercial success of his 1982 Thriller album. McCartney, arguably the primary creative force behind the Beatles (though some believe that it was John Lennon), was his most creative between ages seventeen and twenty-seven, before and during his success with the group. Try as he might, none of McCartney’s later songs matched the impact of his early ones.

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age,” said the novelist Aldous Huxley.²² Walt Disney (1901–1966) did just that and thereby transformed the world of entertainment. “I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty.”²³ The story line of a Disney film is invariably a fairy tale or imaginary adventure. In addition to creating such megahits as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), Cinderella (1945), Treasure Island (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Robin Hood (1952), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Mary Poppins (1964), Disney created child-oriented TV shows such as Disney’s Wonderful World and The Mickey Mouse Club, built Disneyland, and started Disney World and Epcot Center. What child in the West in the last fifty years has not played with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Pluto, or Goofy? And it all began with a child-friendly character named Mickey Mouse.

“He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood,” Disney recalled in 1948.²⁴ Thereafter, on TV, in animated cartoons, or in films, Disney himself always provided the voice, indeed inhabited the role, of Mickey. As a child growing up in Missouri, Disney lived near the Atkinson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway line and became fascinated with railroads. In 1949, he had a quarter-size railroad built in his Los Angeles backyard on which he and his friends could play, and when he constructed Disneyland, he employed a half-size railroad to link its four realms: Adventureland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, and Neverland. Disney liked to ask, “Why do we have to grow up?”

Mozart never did. As his sister, Nannerl, said in 1792, “Apart from his music he was almost always a child, and thus he remained.”²⁵ One of the external markers of Mozart the eternal child was his lifelong use of potty talk. Just as children do not fully understand, or choose to ignore, the rules of grammar and syntax, so they have yet to learn, or choose to ignore, what are considered inappropriate topics of conversation. Below is just one example found in a letter to a cousin that Mozart wrote at age twenty-one. It typifies at least a hundred such utterances coming from the mouth of our genius.

Well, I wish you good night, but first shit in your bed and make it burst. Sleep soundly, my love, into your mouth your arse you’ll shove. . . . Oh, my arse is burning like fire! What on earth does it mean? Perhaps some muck wants to come out? Why yes, muck, I know, see and smell you . . . and . . . what is that?—Is it possible. . . . Ye gods!—can I believe those ears of mine? Yes indeed, it is so—what a long melancholy note!²⁶

Then there are Mozart’s musical canons such as the Latin “Difficile lectu mihi mars et jonicu,” which when heard as a homonym in a Viennese polyglot comes out as “Lech du mich in Arch et Cunjoni” (“Lick my ass and balls”). We’ll skip the “ca-ca, ca-ca, pu-pu, pu-pu” canon and others.

Childish, all this potty talk! But recall that stand-up comedians—Robin Williams, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Dave Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, and so many others—were and are equally obscene. Notice how such comics invariably begin a routine—unless censored on live TV—with a barrage of profanities. Their aim is to call attention not only to themselves by their “bad boy” behavior but also to the creative process, as if to say “By these disruptive words I wish to invite you into a new world in which there are no barriers to full expression. It is now open season on things that we could not talk about before.”

Mozart’s jokes and scatological outbursts occurred mostly at night, when he was relaxing, being silly, and making new connections in an unconsciously childlike, playful way. His excessive profanity was simply a sign that he had gone to “Creativeland.” The comic genius Robin Williams, with his toy soldiers, make-believe worlds, and coprolalia, often journeyed there. Another comic, John Cleese (Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers), in 1991 said this about “inappropriate” creative outbursts: “You have to risk saying things that are silly, illogical and wrong, and know that while you are being creative, nothing is wrong, there is no such thing as a mistake, and any dribble may lead to the breakthrough.”²⁷

Good things can come from imaginary friends. At age six, the painter Frida Kahlo repeatedly escaped through a window “with a little girl, roughly my own age” with whom she laughed and danced.²⁸ Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) imagined Alice cavorting in Alice in Wonderland with an imaginary rabbit. Mozart, too, had an imaginary world and imaginary friends. His own childhood realm he called the Kingdom of Back, filled with citizens of his own imagination.²⁹ In 1787, he and his real friends were on their way to Prague for the premier of his opera Don Giovanni. To pass time, Mozart made up pet names for his wife, his friends, their servant, and even their pet dog. He was Punkitititi, she Schabla Pumfa, the servant, Sagadarata, and the dog, Schamanuzky.³⁰ Later, Mozart populated his opera The Magic Flute with similar imaginary characters such as Papageno and Papagena. When Mozart created his imaginary world en route to Prague, he was not four or six but thirty-one! When he created the childlike kingdom of The Magic Flute in 1791, he had only a few months yet to live.

AT THE 2015 GENIUS GALA AT LIBERTY SCIENCE CENTER IN NEW Jersey, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos explained youthful creativity in these words: “You have to have a certain childlike ability to not be trapped by your expertise. And that fresh look, that beginner’s mind, once you’re an expert, is unbelievably hard to maintain. But great inventors are always looking. They have a certain divine discontent. They may have seen something a thousand times and still, it occurs to them that that thing, even though they’re accustomed to it, could be improved.”³¹ To encourage “a beginner’s mind,” tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Google have built their own “creativity zones.” Amazon has a Wi-Fi-enhanced bird’s nest in a “tree house”; Pixar has wooden huts and caves that serve as meeting rooms; and Google has a beach volleyball court and a pink-flamingo-covered dinosaur. In fact, the Liberty Science Center itself is not a museum of science and technology but rather a gigantic play space in which you can dig for dinosaur bones, build a Lego city, explore your way through a Disney-based jungle, or fashion a cave out of sponge blocks. Kids are welcome, too.

“Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination,” Walt Disney said. “But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.” But why does the imaginative capacity of the human spirit pale as it morphs from childhood to adulthood, from the world of the imagination to that of adult reality, as Kanye West suggests? As we grow up, we become responsible for our own survival in real terms, putting food on the table, and so on. Many animals display playful flexibility during childhood but then follow rigidly programmed patterns as adults. Neoteny saves us.

Neoteny is a term coined by evolutionary biologists to explain the human capacity to perpetuate juvenile characteristics, such as curiosity, play, and imagination, into adult life.³² In a 1979 article in Natural History titled “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould observed that “Humans are neotenic. We have evolved by retaining to adulthood the originally juvenile features of our ancestors. . . . We have very long periods of gestation, markedly extended childhoods, and the longest life span of any mammal. The morphological features of eternal youth have served us well.”³³ A childlike “what-if” imagination is one of the things that makes us human. It accounts for our discoveries and innovations in art, science, and social organization. It allows us to see the world of the future. As the eternal child Albert Einstein said in 1929, “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”³⁴ Although we owe human progress to neoteny, this specialized term is unfamiliar to many of us, and certainly to my spellchecker. Neoteny: the retention of juvenile traits in human adults, a species-preserving habit so deeply engrained as to be almost entirely hidden.

IN SUM, WHAT CAN WE CONCLUDE FROM THIS FORAY INTO THE minds of childlike geniuses over the centuries? That the least helpful thing we can say to our children, as well as to ourselves, is “Grow up!” Children’s bedtime stories, fairy tales with genies and godmothers, play toys and puppets, tree forts and dollhouses, recess, camps outside of school and home, and imaginary friends; adult play/work spaces, creative retreats, comedy hours, and the injunction to “go play with this idea”—these things allow us to retain or recapture our creative minds. The poet Charles Baudelaire got it right when he observed in 1863, “Genius is only childhood recovered at will.”³⁵