Gifts allow us to demonstrate exactly how little we know about a person. And nothing pisses a person off more than being shoved into the wrong pigeonhole.
Could you just call me Pigeon?†he asked the teacher when she read his name. “Does your mother call you Pigeon?†“No.†“Then to me you are Paul.†... “Nathan Sutter,†the teacher read. “My mother never calls me Nathan.†“Is it Nate?†“She calls me Honeylips.
A crossbow?†Pigeon asked. I left my battle-ax in my other jeans,†the man said.
The author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the "innocence of eye" that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeon-holing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word "trite" has hardly any meaning for him; and always to see "the correspondences between things" of which Aristotle spoke two thousand years ago.