Understanding intensity

Parents and educators often discuss the intensity we see in gifted children and frequently marvel at the passion by which the gifted experience everything they care about in life (and completely ignore those things that do not matter to them).

Christine Fonseca has become one of my favorite bloggers for the gifted.  In a recent post, she discussed intensity and included this famous poem by Pearl Buck, (1892-1973), recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this:

A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.

To him… a touch is a blow,

a sound is a noise,

a misfortune is a tragedy,

a joy is an ecstasy,

a friend is a lover,

a lover is a god,

and failure is death.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create – – – so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

— Pearl Buck