Late Bloomers
March 9, 2009
My friend, Fritz Kling, just sent me a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell called “Late Bloomer.” It appeared in The New Yorker in October 2008 and I find the fact that Fritz sent an article on late blooming to me four months late rather ironic.
In the midst of abundant cultural examples of early bloomers, Gladwell makes a strong case for how many great leaders/artists/thinkers/people bloomed rather late. Some interesting findings:
1. An economist at the University of Chicago looked through 47 major poetry anthologies and counted the poems that appeared most frequently. The top eleven are T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,”
Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed by authors who were aged 23, 41, 48, 40, 29, 30, 30, 28, 38, 42, and 59, respectively.
2. Alfred Hitchcok, famed director of “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho” created those films when he was in his 50′s and 60′s.
3. Picasso is famous for being a young and inspired artist. But in comparing the price of painting sales by Picasso with Cezanne today, a painting done by Picasso in his mid-20s is worth four times as much as a painting done by Picasso in his 60s. Cezanne’s art reveals an opposite trend. Cezanne’s paintings from his 60′s are worth 15 times his paintings as a younger man.
Why am I talking about old, dead artists in a blog related to teenagers? Because we can NEVER give up on kids. Please don’t give up on the kid who’s a flake at age 14. Who knows where that kid will be by age 17, let alone age 27 or 47?
Some of our kids bloom early; others bloom late. Let’s please be patient gardeners.
©2009 Fuller Youth Institute
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Dave Campbell