Creativity, Innovation, and Change

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
CREATIVITY AND CULTURE

Creativity,
Innovation, and
Change Across
Cultures
Edited by
David D. Preiss
Marcos Singer
James C. Kaufman
Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture

Series Editors
Vlad Petre Glaveanu
Department of Psychology and Counselling
Dublin City University
Dublin, Ireland

Brady Wagoner
Communication and Psychology
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Both creativity and culture are areas that have experienced a rapid growth
in interest in recent years. Moreover, there is a growing interest today in
understanding creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon and culture as a
transformative, dynamic process. Creativity has traditionally been con-
sidered an exceptional quality that only a few people (truly) possess, a
cognitive or personality trait ‘residing’ inside the mind of the creative
individual. Conversely, culture has often been seen as ‘outside’ the person
and described as a set of ‘things’ such as norms, beliefs, values, objects,
and so on. The current literature shows a trend towards a different under-
standing, which recognises the psycho-socio-cultural nature of creative
expression and the creative quality of appropriating and participating in
culture. Our new, interdisciplinary series Palgrave Studies in Creativity
and Culture intends to advance our knowledge of both creativity and
cultural studies from the forefront of theory and research within the
emerging cultural psychology of creativity, and the intersection between
psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, business, and cultural
studies. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture is accepting proposals
for monographs, Palgrave Pivots and edited collections that bring together
creativity and culture. The series has a broader focus than simply the cul-
tural approach to creativity, and is unified by a basic set of premises about
creativity and cultural phenomena.
David D. Preiss • Marcos Singer
James C. Kaufman
Editors

Creativity,
Innovation, and
Change Across
Cultures
Editors
David D. Preiss Marcos Singer
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Santiago, Chile Santiago, Chile

James C. Kaufman
Neag School of Education
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT, USA

ISSN 2755-4503     ISSN 2755-4511 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-28205-8        ISBN 978-3-031-28206-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28206-5

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 For Daniela Bolivar, with love
—David

For my family
—Marcos

For Christa L. Taylor,

from student to close collaborator and dear friend
—James
 Preface

Human action has impacted the natural environment to a degree that

could not have been envisioned 100 years ago. Among the most concern-
ing consequences of human actions are a changing climate, the destruc-
tion of ecosystems, and the extinction of many animal and vegetal species
that we once took for granted. These are just some of many crises that
face the generations to come. We are still mired in an ongoing global
pandemic amidst sporadic threats that it might suddenly worsen again
(or have a new virus take hold). There remain socioeconomic inequality
and outgroup hatred (ranging from issues of ethnicity to gender to cul-
ture to sexual orientation) to the point of nuclear war no longer seeming
like a long-dormant threat. With new technological and digital advances
come new challenges, such as figuring out how to maximize the benefits
of such innovations while holding onto our humanity.
One of the few common threads among these disparate challenges is
that they will need individual, group, and societal creativity and innova-
tion to effect change. There are also many positive outcomes from cre-
ativity and innovation. These range from the personal benefits of
individual creativity to larger-scope possibilities. For example, innovation
in products, services, processes, and business models has been at the heart
of economic development. One of the founders of modern economic
thought, Joseph Schumpeter, conceptualized innovation and entrepre-
neurship as the engine of history. The driving force behind creativity and
vii
viii Preface

innovation is change. We typically think of this concept as moving toward

positive change. It can also refer to mobilizing to avoid negative change.
We can create and innovate to change our environment, our work, and
ourselves.
The final piece of this puzzle is the interlocking relationships between
creativity, innovation, change, and culture. There is a vast literature on
creativity and culture. Many of the most influential theories and models
emphasize the impact of culture in the development of creativity and
how creativity impacts on and mobilizes cultural change across several
domains. Similarly, research on innovation has remarked how the cul-
tural context can foster or limit the development of invention and entre-
preneurship. Culture is a term that can have many meanings. In this
volume, “culture” refers to sociocultural differences, educational culture,
media culture, organizational culture, technological culture, ethnic dif-
ferences within a culture, and digital culture, among many others. The
chapters ahead offer insights on how creativity, innovation, and change
can propel us forward and offer hope for the future across these many
different forms of culture.
Part One of the book is devoted to educational and developmental
explorations of creativity, innovation, and change. It includes three chap-
ters. The first chapter, by Grigorenko, takes an evolutionary perspective
on the innovativeness of Homo sapiens. It concatenates diverse lines of
evidence from three types of innovation that generate new skills: spoken
language, written language, and the language of digital communication.
These three types of language skills are compared with a focus on the
origin and timeline of their emergence; their acquisition, functional
properties, and utility for Homo sapiens; and their biological bases. The
second chapter by Plucker, Meyer, and Makel takes a sociocultural
approach to discuss some developmental factors which are important in
the assessment of creative potential and ability: attitudes toward creativ-
ity, the specificity of creative processes, levels of creative expression, and
the need for creative articulation. The authors present a developmental
framework for designing creativity assessment systems that can inform
planning and development. The third chapter in this part, by Tymms and
Bolden, proposes that the most effective educational innovations happen
within classrooms, but as researchers aggregate up to the school, district,
 Preface ix

or country level, the innovations have barely detectable effects on stu-

dents’ progress. The authors propose that researchers have made major
methodological advances but have failed to fully understand the educa-
tional system well enough to predict the impact of interventions. They
specify what policymakers and researchers need to do to enhance
education.
Part Two of the book is devoted to creativity, innovation, and change
in organizations and work. The first chapter, by Maliakkal and Reiter-­
Palmon, introduces an overview of organizational culture, discusses the
mechanisms by which organizational culture theoretically impacts cre-
ativity, and highlights dimensions of organizational culture that have
been empirically found to facilitate and hinder creativity. The authors pay
particular attention to culture dimensions encompassed in (1) the five
determinants of organizational culture, (2) the Competing Values
Framework, and (3) Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Next, Singer pres-
ents three strategic considerations through well-known company cases:
(1) the importance of not overloading oneself with innovation, as illus-
trated by the LEGO case; (2) the convenience of delegating creativity to
the competitor, as in the case of the Cola Wars, so that the competitor
assumes its risks; and (3) the usefulness of accepting the mistakes of the
creation process in a timely manner to abort problematic projects, as in
the case of Google. The final chapter of this part, by Cropley and Singh,
discusses how in the era of digital transformation, soft skills and creativity
are more important than technology per se in engineering innovation.
The authors review how change has been the driver of innovation in engi-
neering and how this has propelled the work of engineers to problem
solving. The authors propose that there is now a growing acknowledg-
ment that engineers must be set with a capability focus (CF) compelled
by creativity and other soft skills, joined by conventional technology flu-
ency (TF).
The third part of the book contains sociocultural explorations of the
main topics of the book. The first chapter of this part, by Kapoor and
Henderson, introduces an anecdotal account of the use of innovative
deception in diverse cultures. The authors present several illustrations of
financial fraud and other illegal activities to discuss innovative deception.
Thus, they introduce a description of innovative deception which
x Preface

integrate research in creativity, innovation, and morality across cultures

and discuss existing and emerging consequences of this phenomenon.
The next chapter by Tang, Bai, and Hofreiter reports a cross-cultural
study carried out among Chinese and German university students about
their creative activities and those they observed from others during the
lockdown periods of the pandemic. The authors report that six major
creativity categories arise from their data: Artistic Creativity, Inventions
& Business Ideas, Intellectual Creativity, Social Interactions, Sports, and
Challenges. They report similarities and differences between their sam-
ples. In the third chapter of this part, Lebuda and Karwowski focus on
how media across cultures display a perspective on the nature of abilities
and examine a specific case of the so-called talent shows. The authors
explore mindsets presented in “… Got Talent!” programs in China,
Poland, and the US. Finally, they discuss the opportunities and threats
associated with the role of social factors in our understanding of abilities
and their development. The last two chapters of this part focus on theater
and poetry. Using the structure of the Systems Model of Creativity,
Panero explores parts of theater history from the sixth century BCE to
the seventeenth century CE. Further, the Four C Model of Creativity is
invoked to complement the “individual” element. The author proposes
that taking into consideration multiple creativity models to examine the-
ater history could advance our understanding of the thoughts, actions,
and processes related to creativity. Finally, Preiss discusses the limitations
of intelligence research to understand creativity and introduces a model
of innovation as problem solving which utilizes both abilities and atten-
tional dispositions. This model is then applied to creative writing, specifi-
cally poetry.
The fourth part of the book is devoted to creativity and innovation as
a vehicle for cultural change. The first chapter of this part, by Jackson,
Luria and Kaufman, looks at how art reflects culture—including the
biases and inequity of a society. Art can reflect the worst of humanity, the
authors note, but it can also enable the types of conversations and engage-
ments that can connect people and potentially move toward positive
change. Next, Greenfield applies a theory of social change, cultural evolu-
tion, and human development for understanding creativity in diverse
cultural settings. She presents evidence from the Mayans of Chiapas and
 Preface xi

the Ethiopian immigrants to Israel to show that innovation is not a val-

ued form of creativity in subsistence settings, whereas creativity as inno-
vation is a cultural adaptation to a commercial ecology in which formal
education is important. She notes that her findings suggest that the defi-
nition of human creativity is not fixed but shifts across generations to
adapt to evolving historical and ecological circumstances. Finally,
Sternberg introduces the notion of cultural creativity, which he defines as
the ability to be creative across cultural boundaries, both of space and of
time. In his chapter, he presents the concept and a description of the
challenges that people face when they seek to be creative across cultures.
Then he discusses the components of cultural creativity and draws con-
clusions regarding why cultural creativity is so critical in contemporary
society.
The final part of the book is devoted to creativity, innovation, and
change that help us look forward. The first chapter in this part, by Hartley
and Viskontas, explores the ways in which digital technologies can both
assist and spoil human creativity. The authors argue that as Artificial
Intelligence moves to machine learning, computers are now potential
innovators and creative partners. The authors propose that human col-
laboration with machines fosters innovation but might also have a nega-
tive impact on the work of skill development that is required for eminent
creativity. Next, Beghetto discusses what motivates change and innova-
tion. He describes different types of uncertainty, including those that are
resolvable and those that are not, and then discusses how uncertainty
serves as a lever for innovation and change. He also comments on possi-
ble personal changes, social innovations, and negative and unintended
consequences that can result from engaging with uncertainty. Finally,
closing the book and this part, Canina, Bruno, and Glaveanu present a
framework that redefines creativity in the post-Anthropocene era and
highlights four relevant dimensions that are needed to maintain a
dynamic balance: regenerative creativity, digital creativity, ethics, and
futures thinking. The authors posit that it is necessary to ask how to
expand the definition of creativity to make it more inclusive to non-­
human agents and to rethink the values and ethics involved in this process.
We will not solve the exhausting problems we face as a society if we
continue doing the same old thing—hence the urgency of harnessing the
xii Preface

immense creative potential of the human mind. It is therefore urgent that

companies, organizations, and governments adopt an innovation strat-
egy. But strategy is not enough, because as the legendary management
author Peter Drucker said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So, we need
to better understand whether culture is in our favor or whether, on the
contrary, it will eat away at our hope for progress. Also, we need to under-
stand the set of values underlying when innovation happens since not all
innovation or change is necessarily positive.
In this book, we have attempted to provide a broad overview of the
creation and innovation chain for change, within the various cultural
contexts in which it can take place. We hope it will be useful to our read-
ers, who we trust share not only our concern for the future of our society,
but also our conviction that a deeper understanding of creativity, culture,
and change, together with a commitment to work for the common good,
will forge a better future for our children.
We conclude this preface by thanking the wonderful authors and
researchers that contributed to this volume, as well as to the fantastic
Palgrave Press team that supported the development of this book. The
work of David D. Preiss in this book was supported by grant FONDECYT
no. 1181095. He expresses his gratitude to Agencia Nacional de
Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID).

David D. Preiss
Marcos Singer
James C. Kaufman
 Contents

Part I Educational and Developmental Explorations of

Creativity, Innovation, and Change   1

1 The
 Never-Ending Innovativeness of Homo Sapiens  3
Elena L. Grigorenko

2 Supporting
 Innovation: Sociocultural and Developmental
Considerations in the Assessment of Creativity 29
Jonathan A. Plucker , Melanie S. Meyer , and
Matthew C. Makel

3 Innovation
 and Change Within Education 51
Peter Tymms and David Bolden

Part II Creativity, Innovation, and Change in Organizations

and Work  69

4 Creativity
 and Organizational Culture 71
Nadine T. Maliakkal and Roni Reiter-Palmon

xiii
xiv Contents

5 Strategic
 Considerations for Enhancing Creativity in the
Firm 99
Marcos Singer

6 Engineering
 Innovation: The Impact of Digital
Transformation115
David H. Cropley and Chanvi Singh

Part III Sociocultural Explorations of Creativity, Innovation,

and Change 141

7 Innovative
 Deception across Cultures143
Hansika Kapoor and Simon Henderson

8 Creative
 Activities During the COVID-19 Pandemic:
Chinese and German Observations175
Min Tang, Xinwen Bai, and Sebastian Hofreiter

9 Who’s
 Got Talent and How They Got it: How Culture and
Media Might Shape (Creative) Mindsets207
Izabela Lebuda and Maciej Karwowski

10 Theater
 History and Models of Creativity239
Maria Eugenia Panero

11 Mind
 Wandering and Mindfulness During Innovation:
An Outline and an Illustration in Poetry267
David D. Preiss

Part IV Creativity and Innovation as a Vehicle for Cultural

Change 295

12 A
 Mirror to the World: Art, Creativity, and Racial Bias297
Barbara-Shae Jackson, Sarah R. Luria, and James C. Kaufman
 Contents xv

13 Social
 Change and Creativity Change: How Creative
Products and the Nature of Creativity Differ in
Subsistence Ecologies with High Mortality and
Commercial Ecologies with Low Mortality315
Patricia M. Greenfield

14 Cultural
 Creativity: A Componential Model363
Robert J. Sternberg

Part V Creativity, Innovation, and Change Looking Forward 389

15 How
 Technology Is Changing Creativity391
Isabella Hartley and Indre Viskontas

16 Uncertainty
 as a Lever for Change and Innovation413
Ronald A. Beghetto

17 Innovating
 in the Post-Anthropocene Era: A New
Framework for Creativity439
Marita Canina, Carmen Bruno, and Vlad P. Glaveanu

I ndex461
 Notes on Contributors

Xinwen Bai is Associate Professor of Industrial/Organizational

Psychology at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
He received his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research
interests include organizational creativity and innovation, work motiva-
tions, job design, and work teams.
Ronald A. Beghetto serves as Pinnacle West Presidential Chair and
Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State
University. His research focuses on creative thought and action, the role
of uncertainty in creativity and innovation, and the possible. He is a fel-
low of the American Psychological Association (Div. 10) and the
International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation.
David Bolden is Associate Professor and Lecturer in Mathematics
Education in the School of Education, Durham University, UK. His
research interests include, among other things, mathematics teaching and
learning, including understanding, and the use of representations in
developing young children’s understanding.
Carmen Bruno holds a PhD in Design and is a researcher and adjunct
professor at the Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano. Her
research focuses on investigating the influence of digital technologies on
the creative design process, and how the digital evolution is evolving cre-

xvii
xviii Notes on Contributors

ativity too. She merges a human-centered perspective, design thinking,

futures thinking and co-design methodologies to facilitate radical inno-
vation. She took part in EU and national projects collaborating with rel-
evant companies.
Marita Canina is Associate Professor in Design at Politecnico di Milano.
As Scientific Director of IDEActivity Center, she coordinates various EU
research, national and international projects. She was a postdoc associate at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2006, contributing to
wearable tech research for an Extravehicular Activity (EVA) spacesuit.
Current research is focused on developing methods and tools that combine
research in design and design futures, studies on creativity, and a people-
centered approach to enhance the creative design process for innovation.
David Cropley is Professor of Engineering Innovation at the University
of South Australia in Adelaide. His research in creativity spans the assess-
ment of product creativity, creativity in education, malevolent creativity,
and, most recently, the use of Artificial Intelligence to automatically score
figural creativity tests.
Vlad P. Glaveanu is Full Professor of Psychology, School of Psychology,
Dublin City University, and Professor II at the Centre for the Science of
Learning and Technology, University of Bergen. His work on creativity,
culture, and human possibility has been published in more than 200
articles, chapters, and books.
Patricia M. Greenfield is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a visiting scholar in
the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
and has received awards for research, scholarship, and teaching from the
American Psychological Association, the German Society for Cultural
Psychology, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the Jean
Piaget Society.
Elena L. Grigorenko received her PhD in General (Cognitive)
Psychology from Moscow State University, Russia; her PhD in
Developmental Psychology and Genetics from Yale University; and her
 Notes on Contributors xix

re-specialization in Clinical (Forensic) Psychology from Fielding

University. Dr. Grigorenko has authored more than 500 published peer-
reviewed articles, book chapters, and books.
Isabella Hartley is a Psychology major with a Neuroscience minor at
the University of San Francisco. Her interests are directed toward the
neuronal effects of dance and music, and how we can benefit from their
application to therapies.
Simon Henderson is an independent deception consultant working in
the UK and the US. His career has involved researching, teaching, and
consulting on deception, counter-deception, information operations,
and cyber operations within a variety of government, military, and law
enforcement organizations. He is passionate about novel and pro-social
applications of these fields.
Sebastian Hofreiter is a doctoral candidate working at the Institute for
Creativity and Innovation, University of Applied Management, Germany.
His research focuses on exploring the psychology of creativity, malevolent
creativity, and the application of creativity at work.
Barbara-Shae Jackson is a doctoral candidate in the Psychology
Department, University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the activa-
tion of race-based perceptions during aesthetic experience and their influ-
ence on art judgment and relationship to openness, racism, and cognitive
ability.
Hansika Kapoor is a research author at the Department of Psychology,
Monk Prayogshala, Mumbai. She holds a PhD from IIT, Bombay, is the
recipient of the Fulbright–Nehru Post-doctoral Research Fellowship
(2019–2020), and is an affiliate at the University of Connecticut. Dr.
Kapoor has been cited as a subject matter expert in numerous features on
social and cognitive psychology in the Indian context. Hansika has also
been featured in the book 31 Fantastic Adventures in Science: Women
Scientists in India.
Maciej Karwowski is Professor of Psychology at the University of
Wrocław, where he directs the Creative Behavior Lab. Karwowski’s
research focuses on creative self-beliefs and their role in fulfilling creative
xx Notes on Contributors

potential, as well as the possibilities to enrich creativity among children,

youth, and adults. Karwowski is an author of more than 200 articles and
chapters and the incoming editor of the Journal of Creative Behavior.
James C. Kaufman is Professor of Educational Psychology at the
University of Connecticut. He is the author/editor of more than 50
books, which include the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and the
forthcoming The Creativity Advantage and Lessons in Creativity from
Musical Theatre Characters (with Dana Rowe).
Izabela Lebuda is Associate Professor at the Creative Behavior Lab,
University of Wrocław, and the Creative Cognition Lab, University of
Graz. Her research focuses on creative self-beliefs, creative metacogni-
tion, and the social context of creative achievement.
Sarah R. Luria is a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology at the
University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on the relationship between
creativity and educational equity as well as human rights education. Sarah
is a Philanthropic Educational Organization (PEO) scholar and was hon-
ored to receive the Gavin Dissertation award. She has a passion for anti-
oppressive teaching practices and culturally sustaining pedagogy.
Matthew Makel is Associate Research Professor at the School of
Education, Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on academic
talent development and research methods.
Nadine Maliakkal is a doctoral candidate of Industrial/Organizational
(I/O) Psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). She
received her Master’s of Arts in I/O Psychology from UNO. Her research
interests include creativity, leadership, emotions, and diversity, equity,
and inclusion.
Melanie S. Meyer is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of
Education, Johns Hopkins University, and holds a PhD in Educational
Psychology from the University of North Texas. She has been a classroom
teacher for over 20 years and teaches graduate courses in creativity and
research methods. Her research focuses on education policy and school-
based talent development.
 Notes on Contributors xxi

Maria Eugenia Panero is a former actor and singer turned research psy-
chologist with a PhD in Social Psychology from Boston College. Her
studies explore the psychological effects of entering fictional worlds and
characters through acting on stage, watching performances, or reading
literature. She has published and presented her award-winning work
throughout the globe, and was featured in major news outlets, including
CNN, Time magazine, and The Atlantic.
Jonathan Plucker is Julian C. Stanley Professor of Talent Development
at Johns Hopkins University, where he works at the Center for Talented
Youth and School of Education. His work focuses on creativity and inno-
vation in education, education policy, and talent development. His most
recent book is the second edition of Creativity and Innovation.
David D. Preiss is a psychologist interested in the psychology of creativ-
ity. He is Professor of Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica
de Chile. He holds a PhD in Psychology from Yale University, which he
attended as a Fulbright scholar. He is a fellow of the Association for
Psychological Science. Preiss is the author of more than 50 papers and
book chapters in the fields of cultural psychology and educational psy-
chology, and the co-editor of five international books in different areas of
psychology.
Roni Reiter-Palmon is Distinguished Professor of Industrial/
Organizational Psychology. Her research focuses on individual and team
creativity, creative problem-solving processes and team processes that
facilitate creativity and innovation, creative skills development, and orga-
nizational factors that facilitate or inhibit creativity and innovation. She
is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA; Divs. 10 and
14). She is incoming president of Division 10 of the APA.
Marcos Singer is Full Professor of Operations Management and Dean
of the MBA at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). He holds
a BA in Industrial Engineering and an MS in Computer Science from
PUC, and a PhD in Operations Research from Columbia University.
Professor Singer has co-­authored several papers in management journals
and books, such as A Practical Optimization Theory. He also works as a
board member and a consultant for several Chilean firms and institutions.
xxii Notes on Contributors

Chanvi Singh is completing her PhD from the University of South

Australia in Adelaide, focused on innovation and digital transformation.
Outside of her graduate studies, Chanvi is a Senior Associate at the pro-
fessional services firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Robert J. Sternberg is a psychologist interested in the psychology of
intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. He is Professor of Psychology at
Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the
University of Heidelberg, Germany. His PhD is from Stanford University
and he holds 13 honorary doctorates. He is a past winner of the
Grawemeyer Award in Psychology and the James and Cattell Awards
from the Association for Psychological Science (APS).
Min Tang is Professor of International Management and Director of the
Institute for Creativity and Innovation at the University of Applied
Management, Germany. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the
University of Munich. Her research focuses on systems approach to cre-
ativity, implicit theories of creativity, management of creativity and inno-
vation, team creativity, and cross-cultural studies.
Peter Tymms is an emeritus professor. His main research interests
include monitoring, assessment, performance indicators, ADHD, read-
ing, and research methodology. He started the Performance Indicators in
Primary Schools (PIPS) project, which is designed to monitor the affec-
tive and cognitive progress of children through primary (elementary)
school. It has been used with more than five million children. Peter
Tymms was Director of the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management
(CEM) Centre until 2011 when he took over as Head of Department in
the School of Education.
Indre Viskontas is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University
of San Francisco, where she runs the Creative Brain Lab. She is also an
accomplished opera singer and stage director, and the Director of
Communications for the Sound Health Network. She holds a Master’s of
 Notes on Contributors xxiii

Music in Voice Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of

Music and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In ­addition to authoring more than 50
peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, she is also an avid science com-
municator, having hosted and co-created four podcasts with more than
14 million downloads and 450 episodes.
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Areas of Emphasis for Creativity Assessment by Developmental

Level. Note. Plucker et al. (2022, February 2). Reprinted
with permission 45
Fig. 6.1 Change drives innovation 118
Fig. 6.2 The Black Death as a catalyst for innovation 119
Fig. 6.3 Change as a driver of more than innovation 121
Fig. 6.4 New technology driving digital transformation and the
future of work 123
Fig. 6.5 Divergent and convergent cognition (based on Cropley,
2015)133
Fig. 10.1 Timeline of historical events related to theater 242
Fig. 11.1 The toolkit of the mind 272
Fig. 12.1 Willie Porter Jr. (2015). COPS. Acrylic on Canvas. Flushing
NY/US. Note. Artist Willie Porter Jr. conveys through this
painting a malignant moral issue plaguing American
Society, Police brutality. The image reflects how state-­
sanctioned violence haunts both the oppressor and the
oppressed. If used as a tool, paintings like this one can be a
mirror by which viewers connect with the imagery and
intentionally examine racists systems and ideals, in hopes of
finding creative solutions for dismantling them 305

xxv
xxvi List of Figures

Fig. 13.1 Zinacantec woman‘s huipil or blouse, 1948. From the Petul
Vasquez family. Collection of the author, UCLA.
Photograph by Don Cole 318
Fig. 13.2 Zinacantec woman‘s huipil or blouse, 1960. Museum
of Us. Photograph courtesy of the Museum 318
Fig. 13.3 A Zinacantec girl from Nabenchauk wearing a huipil,
1966. Photograph courtesy of Frank Cancian 319
Fig. 13.4 Huipiles. Zinacantan Center, 1971. Photograph by Frank
Cancian from Another Place. Reproduced courtesy of Frank
Cancian320
Fig. 13.5 Huipil embroidered by Lupa Z’us at the same time as her
mother made the blouse shown in the next figure.
Nabenchauk, 1993. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 321
Fig. 13.6 Huipil embroidered by the mother of Lupa Z’us.
Nabenchauk, 1993. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 321
Fig. 13.7 Cousin Loxa’s original version of the huipil made for the
Guadalupe fiesta in December 1992. Acrylic. Photographed
in Nabenchauk by Patricia Greenfield 322
Fig. 13.8 Loxa’s mother’s version of the huipil made for the
December 1992 fiesta. Acrylic. Photographed in
Nabenchauk by Patricia Greenfield 322
Fig. 13.9 Huipil made by Maruch, a teenage girl, for the May 1993
fiesta. Photographed in Nabenchauk by Patricia Greenfield 323
Fig. 13.10 Huipil woven by Paxku’ Pavlu. Acrylic. (24″ high by 30
1/2″ wide) Nabenchauk, 2004. Collection of the author,
UCLA324
Fig. 13.11 Huipil embroidered on store-bought cloth by Paxku’ Pavlu.
Acrylic. (24 1/2″ high by 30″ wide) Nabenchauk, 2004.
Collected by the author in 2005 324
Fig. 13.12 First woven huipil, made by Paxku’ Pavlu for her daughter
Marielena, then one year old. Nabenchauk, 2004. Acrylic
(12″ high by 16″ wide). Collection of the author, UCLA 325
Fig. 13.13 Woven huipil, made by Paxku’ Pavlu for her daughter
Marielena. Nabenchauk, 2004. Acrylic (15 3/4″ high by 16
1/2″ wide). Collection of the author, UCLA 326
Fig. 13.14 Marielena’s cotton huipil, woven by her mother Paxku’
Pavlu. Acrylic (13 1/2″ high by 16 1/2″ wide). Collected by
the author in Nabenchauk, August 2005  327
 List of Figures xxvii

Fig. 13.15 A copy of Paxku’ Pavlu’s cotton huipil woven in

Nabenchauk for Sna Jolobil in 2005, woven by Paxku’. (24
1/2″ high by 29″ wide); collected by Patricia Greenfield in
February 2006 327
Fig. 13.16 A copy of a second cotton huipil woven by Paxku’ Pavlu in
Nabenchauk for Sna Jolobil in 2005, woven by Paxku’. (25″
high by 29 1/2″ wide); collected by Patricia Greenfield in
February 2006 328
Fig. 13.17 Cotton bags by Paxku’ Pavlu, originally designed for Sna
Jolobil. Red one (6 1/4“ high by 7” wide) woven in
Nabenchauk in 2005, and blue one (7 ¼“ high by 7 ¼”
wide) in 2006. Collection of author 328
Fig. 13.18 Man’s woven poncho (pok’ k’u’ul). Woven and embroidered
by Maruch Xulubte’, Nabenchauk, 2015. Collected and
photographed by the author. Note the innovation of
embroidering with ribbon, highlighted in the detail
close-­up on the right. However, the background design goes
back to the standardized poncho weave from the 1960s and
even earlier (Greenfield, 2004) 329
Fig. 13.19 Beta Israel woman winnowing grain, Wallaka, Ethiopia,
1984. Photo: Doron Bacher. The Museum of the Jewish
People at Beit Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual Documentation
Center338
Fig. 13.20 Jewish woman making pottery in a village, 20 km from
Gondar (Lake Tana), on the road to Dabat, Ethiopia, April
1983. Photo: Sandro Carabelli, Italy. The Museum of the
Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual
Documentation Center, courtesy of S. Carabelli 339
Fig. 13.21 Beta Israel members selling clay artifacts in the local market,
Wallaka, Gondar Region, Ethiopia, 1984. Photo: Doron
Bacher. The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot,
The Oster Visual Documentation Center 340
Fig. 13.22 Pottery figurines made by Beta Israel women, Wallaka,
Ethiopia, 1960s. Photo: Ya’akov Brill. The Museum of the
Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual
Documentation Center, courtesy of Harel family 341
Fig. 13.23 Mother with babes in both arms. By Adiseh Baruch, 2016.
(Dates here and in subsequent slides are dates of purchase.
Date of creation is not known.) Photograph by Patricia
Greenfield342
xxviii List of Figures

Fig. 13.24 Pregnant woman with a necklace and a high neck decora-
tion. Unknown artist, 2016. Photograph by Patricia
Greenfield343
Fig. 13.25 Baking clay rabbi figurines, Wallaka, Gondar Region,
Ethiopia, 1984. The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit
Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual Documentation Center 344
Fig. 13.26 Kes (Ethiopian rabbi) with Torah. By Adiseh Baruch, 2016.
Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 345
Fig. 13.27 Kes (Ethiopian rabbi) bringing home sheep. By Adiseh
Baruch, 2016. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 346
Fig. 13.28 Pupils from Ethiopia studying computers in “Mikvah
Israel” Agricultural High School, Israel, March 1986,
Photo: Doron Bacher. The Museum of the Jewish People at
Beit Hatfutsot, The Oster Visual Documentation Center 347
Fig. 13.29 Rabbi reading Torah, grandson listening. By Mamit Sheto,
Ethiopian Jewish Arts Workshop, Be’er Sheva, Israel, 2016.
Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 348
Fig. 13.30 Pounding wheat to separate it from the chaff. By Tziona
Yahim, Ethiopian Jewish Arts Workshop, Be’er Sheva,
Israel, 2016. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 349
Fig. 13.31 Pregnant woman with baby on her back. By Mamit Sheto,
Ethiopian Jewish Arts Workshop, Be’er Sheva, Israel, 2019.
Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 351
Fig. 13.32 Boyfriend and girlfriend. By Mamit Sheto, Ethiopian
Jewish Arts Workshop, Be’er Sheva, Israel, 2016. Note that
this piece is signed, a mark of a movement away from art as
a community expression and toward art as an individual
expression. This is the only signed piece. Photograph by
Patricia Greenfield 354
Fig. 13.33 Family of three sharing a piece of Ethiopian bread.
Unknown artist, Ethiopian Jewish Arts Workshop.
Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 355
Fig. 13.34 Family. By Adiseh Baruch. 2016. Ethiopian Jewish Arts
Workshop. Photograph by Patricia Greenfield 356
 List of Figures xxix

Fig. 16.1 Types of uncertainty. Shaded portions represent potentially

resolvable uncertainties 415
Fig. 17.1 The three dimensions of the post-anthropocentric creativity 450
 List of Tables

Table 6.1 Time (%) spent on core activities, by industry sector (US) 127
Table 6.2 The stages of creative problem solving 131
Table 6.3 The roles of human and artificial creativity 134
Table 8.1 Sample demographic information 183
Table 8.2 Coding scheme for creative ideas/activities and the
relevant examples 185
Table 8.3 Number of participants with valid responses and the
frequencies of ideas/activities mentioned in the
whole sample 187
Table 8.4 Comparison of the reported creative activities across
countries188
Table 8.5 Comparison of the self-reported creative activities
and those of others 189
Table 14.1 A theory of individual modifiability 375
Table 16.1 Potential creative and innovative outcomes from acting on
uncertainty424

xxxi
 Part I
Educational and Developmental
Explorations of Creativity,
Innovation, and Change
 1
The Never-Ending Innovativeness
of Homo Sapiens
Elena L. Grigorenko

The meaning of the word “innovation” is multifaceted. More specifically,

both Merriam-Webster and the Oxford Dictionary converge on the cen-
trality of the word “new” in their definitions by diverging on the exam-
ples used (e.g., new idea, method, product, device, application, action,
process). In this chapter, I elect to focus on a particular type of innova-
tion, manifested in the emergence of a new human skill that transforms
human cognitive capacity and provides opportunities not only for cul-
tural and technological but also for biological advantage. Here, innova-
tion is embedded in the context of biological and cultural evolution, the
ongoing development of Homo sapiens, the wise man. As the wise man is
the only representative of the genus Homo that did not go extinct, it
seems reasonable to assume that this species has learned to change with
and within its ever-changing environment. In other words, as change

E. L. Grigorenko (*)
Department of Psychology and Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation,
and Statistics, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
e-mail: elena.grigorenko@times.uh.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 3

D. D. Preiss et al. (eds.), Creativity, Innovation, and Change Across Cultures, Palgrave
Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28206-5_1
4 E. L. Grigorenko

necessitates the generation of something new, Homo sapiens have been

innovating to react to, predict, and generate change. To illustrate this line
of thinking, I concatenate diverse lines of evidence from three connected
but different types of innovation generating new skills—spoken lan-
guage, written language, and the language of digital communication,
d-language, also known as electronics or e-language. I compare and con-
trast these three types of language skills focusing on three dimensions: (1)
the origin and timeline of their emergence; (2) their acquisition, func-
tional properties, and utility for the wise man; and (3) their biological
bases. I provide brief comments for each of the skills, each of the dimen-
sions of comparisons, and then offer a general discussion on the role of
innovation of new skills in the well-being of the wise man.

Origin and Emergence Timeline

Spoken Language

The emergence of spoken language is a fundamental innovation in the

genus of Homo; its origins are thought to be tightly related to the origins
of human behavior (Holloway, 2017). As science as the source of meth-
ods for studying the origin of language emerged much much later than
language itself, there is a severe shortage of direct empirical evidence
usable for apprehending the origin of language. The evidence used in
such a study includes indirect evidence such as historical (e.g., fossil
records, archeological artifacts) and comparative (e.g., studies of animal
and human communication; diverse languages around the world; and
language acquisition at different stages of human development). Given
these constraints, the modern scientific stance on the emergence timeline
and origin of spoken language is driven primarily by indirect evidence
and theoretical assumptions.
With regard to language emergence, its timeline estimates are broad.
Based on the fossil-based evidence on language’s anatomical prerequi-
sites, the timeline extends over a period from the phylogenetic divergence
of Homo (2.3–2.4 million years ago, mya) from Pan (5–6 mya) to the
 1 The Never-Ending Innovativeness of Homo Sapiens 5

emergence of full behavioral modernity some 50,000–150,000 ya.

Although there is a general agreement that Australopithecus was unlikely
to possess vocal communication skills substantially different from that of
great apes (Arcadi, 2000), there is a wide range of positions regarding the
presence and characteristics of primitive language-like systems, proto-­
language at later evolutionary junctions. What predecessor of the wise
man, Homo habilis (2.3 mya), Homo erectus (1.8 mya), or Homo heidel-
bergensis (0.6 mya), possessed proto-language and how the evolution led
to the development of language proper in Homo sapiens (< 200,000 ya)
are highly disputed issues. However, even for Homo sapiens, there is a
range of estimates based on various computational models placing that
time point around 50,000–150,000 ya (Atkinson, 2011; Perreault &
Mathew, 2012).
With regard to theorizing about the origin of language, in broad
strokes, there are two dimensions on which different theories cluster.
Specifically, continuity theories assume that the emergence of spoken lan-
guage was preceded by the manifestation of other cognitive skills that
made the appearance of spoken language possible. Thus, one of such
theories (Fitch, 2018) puts forward two hypotheses. One, the “phono-
logical continuity hypothesis” posits that these evolutionarily conserved
capacities are detectable in nonhuman animal species (Kikuchi et al.,
2018; ten Cate, 2018; Zuidema & de Boer, 2018) underpin human com-
binatorial phonology—the organization of phonemes into complex
sequences. The second one, the “dendrophilia hypothesis,” refers to the
hierarchical phrasal syntax (the building of “trees”) requiring a higher-­
level supra-regular grammar. Fitch (2018) argues that for this capacity, at
least currently, there is no convincing evidence in any nonhuman species.
Therefore, this capacity, although anchored in sequencing capacities,
needs to be augmented by an additional accessory of a memory “stack,”
which is functionally achieved in Broca’s area through its connections
with parieto-temporal storage areas and through its capacity for hierar-
chical syntax (Flinker & Knight, 2018; Friederici, 2018; Rouault &
Koechlin, 2018).
The common thread of discontinuity theories is the argument that
language is unique to wise men, and its very uniqueness indicates that it
must have manifested in human evolution rather suddenly. Thus,
6 E. L. Grigorenko

Chomsky (1996) argues that a single chance mutation occurred in one

individual in the order of 100,000 ya, installing the language faculty in a
“perfect” or “near-perfect” form via the recruitment of hypothetical com-
ponents of the mid-brain. Despite an early celebration of some genetic
findings that were interpreted as candidates for such a mutation (Pinker,
1994), the mood has been tempered down both by technical issues
(Atkinson et al., 2018) and by a flurry of new genetic, paleontological,
and archeological data. Thus, focusing on the extent of differences
between Neanderthals and modern humans, which, arguably, now appear
to be substantially less than previously thought, Dediu and Levinson
(2018) refer to Neanderthals as “fully articulate beings” with advanced
linguistic capacities and provide a strong gradualist account of the emer-
gence of human and human-like language and communication.

Written Language

Writing is a significant innovation unique to the wise man. Unlike the

research into spoken language, the research into written language is much
more “evidence-based,” as it is rooted in the discovery of ancient scripts.
In fact, the very presence of these scripts is the only evidence that recog-
nizes the evidence for this innovation in a given civilization. Similar to
the theorizing about spoken language, the theorizing about writing also
contained the idea of monogenesis, that is, a single source of this inven-
tion. Although the focus on spoken language was on a single mutation
that led to the rise of spoken language, the focus for writing was on a
single civilization, the ancient Sumer of Mesopotamia. Although the
mechanisms driving these single origins were assumed to be different
(population genetics for the former and cultural diffusion for the latter),
the notion of monogenesis unifies both fields of study. Yet, the current
accumulation of evidence (Olson & Torrance, 2009) indicates that writ-
ing had been invented more than once, being developed autonomously
in at least four ancient civilizations on different time scales. Specifically,
it is stated that writing emerged in Mesopotamia somewhere between
3400 and 3100 BCE (Adkins, 2004); in Egypt somewhere around
3250 BCE (Regulski, 2016); in China about 1200 BCE (Boltz, 1994);
 1 The Never-Ending Innovativeness of Homo Sapiens 7

and in lowland areas of Southern Mexico and Guatemala by 500 BCE

(Fagan et al., 1996).
Notably, more complete and modern (i.e., true) writing systems were
preceded by proto-writing systems that included ideographic or mne-
monic symbols. Although both systems intended to communicate a mes-
sage, when spoken language was insufficient, the precision of
reconstructing this message for the two systems is very different. True
writing assumes an unambiguous interpretation of the message and relies
on an encoded linguistic utterance reconstructable with a fair degree of
accuracy. Proto-writing, on the contrary, does not encode utterances
exactly, making the exact meaning intended by the writer either only able
to be constructed or reconstructed with less precision if a great deal of
context is already known in advance. Importantly, encoding true writing
requires prior knowledge of a spoken language. Proto-writing, like any
symbolic system (e.g., mathematics), does not require such knowledge.
The origin of proto-wring is associated with the usage of clay tokens to
record specific amounts of livestock or commodities during the start of
the pottery phase of the Neolithic. Initially, these tokens were impressed
upon and stored in round clay envelopes, which were gradually replaced
with flat tables and impressions—with a record and with a stylus. True
writing is first recorded in Uruk at the end of the fourth millennium BCE
and soon after in various parts of the Near East (Hallo & Simpson, 1971).

Digital Language

The language of electronics (e-language1) or digital language (d-language)

refers to a cluster of text-based phenomena involving an exchange of
information among users of electronic devices. Unlike the timelines for
spoken and written language, the emergence of d-language is pinpointed
by some authors down to the year. Whereas the roots of e-language go
back to the late nineteenth century to the development of wireless
telegraphy, telex, and other related innovations, Friedman (2016) spots

1
Not to be confused with Chomskyan “external language,” that is., language as transmitted and
shared in the world or community rather than as perceived and understood in the individual (i.e.,
“internal language,” l-language).
8 E. L. Grigorenko

2007 as the year of change, referring to the fact that it was the year Apple
launched its iPhone, Twitter expanded globally, and Amazon released the
Kindle. These events both solidified the market and created the environ-
ment for the rapid development of d-language. Friedrich (2020) draws
an analogy between that time of the invention of the digital printing
press. Importantly, d-language has congealed the status of English as its
nucleus, as it permitted users of different language backgrounds and at
different levels of communicative competence in English to engage with
d-language and other English(es) users. In turn, the status of English, due
to its highly abbreviated nature and the absence of graphic accent marks,
has been elevated (Friedrich, 2020).
There are different forms of d-language, among which is text messag-
ing, referred to as messaging or texting. Texting is real-time “interactive
written discourse” (Ferrara et al., 1991, p. 8), “a one-to-one synchronous
form of computer-mediated communication” (Baron, 2004, p. 13), the
act of composing and sending electronic messages containing alphabetic
and numeric characters over a cellular or Internet network. It is “direct,
immediate, casual online contact” (Schiano et al., 2002). In its original
usage, it referred to using the Short Message Service (SMS). As devices
and their media have grown more sophisticated, so did messaging; in
addition to SMS, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) containing dig-
ital images, videos, sound content, and ideograms (e.g., emoji) emerged.
The attitudes toward digital language are diverse. The popular press
appraisal of messaging had been harsh, claiming that it leads to a “break-
down in the English language,” “the bastardization of language”
(O’Connor, 2005), and even “the linguistic ruin of [the] generation”
(Axtman, 2002). On the contrary, linguists refer to texting as an instance
of a general “linguistic whatever-ism” (Baron, 2003, p. 5), suggesting that
d-language is a “new species of communication,” complete with its own
lexicon, graphology, grammar, and usage conditions (Crystal, 2001, p. 48).
The first usage of SMS is dated 1992 (Hillebrand, 2010). The initial
usage of messaging was low, with 0.4 messages per GSM customer per
month. Since 2007 text messaging has been the most widely used mobile
data service. That year, 74% of all mobile phone users worldwide (or 2.4
billion out of 3.3 billion phone subscribers) were active users of
 1 The Never-Ending Innovativeness of Homo Sapiens 9

SMS. Today 4.2+ billion people around the world have the ability to
send and receive messages via SMS (Vnučec, 2022).

Innovativeness: Timeline

It has been stated that both the degree and the speed of accumulation of
innovations and evolutionary novelty in the genus Homo are unprece-
dented (Tattersall, 2017). Yet, species of Homo sapiens are different both
from their predecessors and from their contemporaries as they continue
to develop new skills at a tremendously accelerated rate, as evident by the
differential time scale for the emergence and development of spoken,
written, and digital languages. The acceleration is from millions for spo-
ken, thousands for written, and only decades of years for d-language.

Functional Properties and Acquisition

Spoken Language

Spoken language is not innate to a wise man. No babies are born with a
mastery of language; language needs to be mastered anew. This “instinc-
tive tendency to acquire an art is not peculiar to man” (Darwin, 1871,
p. 59). The open question, however, is why the wise man “generated” this
skill and institutionalized it as a natural, although acquired, skill for every
representative of Homo sapiens.
The key property and the quintessential function of human language
are to convey complex meanings; this function both generates and sub-
stantiates the critical need to communicate socially, that is, communicate
to communicate rather than to exchange high-stakes signals about dan-
ger, pleasure, or other essential needs (Smith, 2018). As communicational
capacities are present in many nonhumans, the question is what kind of
social conditions were generated by early humans to provide a window of
opportunity for language to evolve. Some scholars argue that this social
transformation has opened opportunities for extensive communication
that called for means stronger than those available before. “Ritual/speech
10 E. L. Grigorenko

coevolution theory,” according to which language evolved with or in ser-

vice of some social behaviors such as rituality, exemplifies this approach
(Shotwell, 2017). An important facet of this argument is that even if a
chance genetic mutation in an evolving bipedal primate were to intro-
duce a language system, it could not have been utilizable under all known
primate social conditions (Smail, 2008). Thus, what has emerged is not
only the speaker but also a recipient who was able to support a conversa-
tion and the context in which a situation-free conversation could emerge.
Like the song of birds or any other animal communication skill, lan-
guage has to be mastered by imitation from the parents (Levelt, 2018).
Yet, although there is a general agreement on the need to master a lan-
guage, there is a major diversification of opinions regarding whether the
acquisition of language is similar to or drastically different from learning
any other skill. Largely, there are two groups of theories reflecting the
polar positions.
According to the language-as-skill viewpoint, mastering a language is
like acquiring any other skill (Chater & Christiansen, 2018). Learning
any skill to mastery requires practice, gradually changing in terms of its
complexity and intensity. Mastering language skills is no different, as
children are engaged in multiple conversational interactions through
repeated and extensive communicative exchanges with adults and other
children around them. Importantly, language learning does not stop as
the process of acquisition continues through learning new names, techni-
cal terms, and idioms and modifying speech patterns and syntactic con-
structions (Christiansen & Chater, 2016). Whereas there are a plethora
of benefits, as with mastery of any new skill, to acquire language early in
life, there is no ceiling for language acquisition. In fact, there is no suffi-
cient evidence for the previously conjectured (Lenneberg, 1967) critical
periods. It has been shown that foreign languages can be mastered on the
foundation of the first language later in life, although not completely
without some undesired first-language interference (Arnon &
Christiansen, 2017) if the languages differ phonetically, morphologically,
or prosodically. It has been argued that such traces are no different from
any other traces common in the transfer of skills in different domains of
learning, such as music or dance (Chater & Christiansen, 2018).
 1 The Never-Ending Innovativeness of Homo Sapiens 11

According to the language-as-knowledge viewpoint (Chomsky, 1965,

1986; Pinker, 1994), mastery of language is unique and incomparable to
the acquisition of any other skill. According to this point of view, chil-
dren are mini-linguists who need to derive a theory of language from the
linguistic environments in which they are immersed. As this derivation is
impossible during the limited period of childhood, when the language is
acquired, language acquisition is driven by the unfolding of an innate
universal grammar. Both the existence and the characteristics of universal
grammar are debated, yet the language-as-knowledge viewpoint is an
active and vibrant area of research.
These two points of view bifurcate the theorizing about the biological
bases of language. According to the first point of view, language is con-
nected to basic psychological mechanisms of learning and processing. In
fact, it is just one example of these mechanisms in which opportunities
and restrictions are common for both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks
(Kidd et al., 2018). From this point of view, the biological bases of lan-
guage can be shared with or re-used and re-tooled from other psychologi-
cal processes, which, in turn, are shaped by the brain’s ability to learn
(Christiansen & Chater, 2016). According to the second point of view,
language is a specialized, distinctly human system that evolved to support
this psychological process and, therefore, has distinct anatomical and
functional brain bases (Friederici, 2018).

Written Language

The transition from proto-writing to true writing is stated (Hallo &

Simpson, 1971) and is marked by three characteristics. First, to be con-
sidered true, a writing system must be complete, so its texts can unam-
biguously communicate a purpose and meaning. Second, it should be
embodied by a set of symbols that are visualizable and printable either
physically or digitally. Third, these symbols must reflect a spoken lan-
guage from and for which the system was derived. Whereas spoken lan-
guage permitted unrestricted situation-free communication and, thus,
has allowed for the accumulation and transmission of information, writ-
ing provided the tool by which this information can be recorded
12 E. L. Grigorenko

consistently and accurately, permitting not only accumulation but also

preservation and transmission of information.
The emergence of writing necessitated the emergence of reading—the
ability to decode, process, and comprehend text. However, reading is a
complex componential process that recruits multiple cognitive systems,
most obviously, the visual, as we need to see the printed word, and the
linguistic systems, as we need to map the visual printed onto the mean-
ingful spoken word. Thus, functionally, writing and reading are two sides
of one coin, as a creation of a text is driven by the need to communicate,
for whatever reason, the information to a recipient, who, in turn, should
be able to decode the text by exercising the skills of reading.
There is a broad agreement in the field that neither writing nor reading
is an innate process. Both need to be acquired, and the acquisition unfolds
with a varying amount of effort and at a particular stage of development
on behalf of both the learners, whose individual differences for both skills
are tremendous, and the teachers, as they adopt and propel different
instructional techniques. Thus, the acquisition of writing and reading
requires the availability of learners who can commit time to master these
complex skills systematically and the availability of teachers who can
patiently and skillfully instruct the learners. All these conditions (i.e., free
time in the hands of the learners and skill and committed effort in the
hands of teachers) had aligned for the wise man, only very recently, speak-
ing in evolutionary terms. Specifically, the required conditions were met
by yet another human innovation—prolonged and extensive schooling,
which emerged as such for the masses only in the late nineteenth century
in Europe and the early to mid-twentieth century elsewhere.
An important byproduct of the development of writing and reading is
the emergence of literature. Whereas scholars differ in their opinion on
what constitutes literature, there is a broad agreement that the very first
writings from ancient Sumer, the early Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the
thousands of ancient Chinese government records do not constitute lit-
erature. Although not without debate, the earliest authors recognized as
literary and known by name are Ptahhotep, who wrote in Egyptian
(Mourad, 2015), and Enheduanna, who wrote in Sumerian (Li et al.,
2003), who lived and wrote around the twenty-­fourth and twenty-third
centuries BCE, respectively.
 1 The Never-Ending Innovativeness of Homo Sapiens 13

Digital Language

The functional properties of d-language, in their essence, are, just like it

is with spoken and written language, to communicate. Examples of mes-
saging “are expressions like my hols wr gr8 (my holidays were great), or c
u 2moro on brdwy (see you tomorrow on Broadway)” (Perea et al., 2009);
all are meant to communicate some information. The exponential growth
of the utilization of texting has led to the inclusion of d-language in the
new editions of mainstream dictionaries (e.g., the Concise Oxford
Dictionary). D-language is a particular form of language filled with
abbreviations that are far from obvious and need to be mastered. These
abbreviations have evolved from their initial use in Internet chat rooms
and instant messaging to the constrained environment of mobile
phones—with a numerical keypad and a limited number of characters
per message (i.e., the d-language originated as a way of reducing the typ-
ing load on a standard mobile phone keyboard). Two of the most fre-
quent strategies (Kul, 2007) used for such abbreviations are (a)
orthographic abbreviations, in particular those implying the deletion of
vowels (e.g., wk., week; pls, please), and (b) phonetic respelling (e.g., c u,
see you; sk8, skate). The boom in messaging has led to changes in the way
we communicate, in particular for younger generations (Perea et al.,
2008; Tagliamonte & Denis, 2008).
Texting has gained tremendous popularity. Over the last decade, the
number of text messages sent monthly has increased by more than
7700%: the average person taps, swipes, or clicks on their phone over
2000 times per day (Winnick & Zolna, 2022). On a regular day on their
cell phones, SMS users send 13 texts daily, quadrupling the number of
emails sent from the same phone. Importantly, almost 60% of consumers
reply with an SMS or MMS within 1–2 minutes on average; texting has
a 209% higher response rate than a phone, email, or Facebook. Whether
for personal or business reasons, texting on a cellular phone has become
a common practice, overriding speaking on the same phone. Importantly,
it reflects not only the growth of cellular coverage and the expansion of
social media but also changes in lifestyles and habits. In fact, messaging
rates are as high as 98%. Moreover, for many users, it is the chosen way
14 E. L. Grigorenko

to communicate; thus, 47% of US smartphone users say they cannot live

without their devices. Messaging also has dramatically increased the audi-
ence of the intended communication; SMS is the only technology har-
monized between all mobile operators worldwide, meaning that text
messaging can connect the world. Thus, texts can reach millions of people
in no time, wherever they are; they can reach virtually all the 6–7 billion
mobile phones in use today. Although used by people of all ages and at all
stages of life, messaging is predominantly the means of communication
for younger people. Thus, research indicates that as many as 75% of mil-
lennials would rather text than talk, citing such reasons to favor texting
as privacy, greater accessibility, less time-consuming, less stressful, multi-
tasking-friendly, and affording balance between various types of activities.

Innovativeness: Function and Acquisition

It is rather apparent and trivial to state that the invention of the three
forms of the language discussed here is to communicate. However,
although their function remains arguably the same, the manner and
scope in which this communication is done are rather different. The spo-
ken language always requires the presence of the other person, the recipi-
ent of the oral communication. Notwithstanding its connectedness to
nonverbal forms of cognition, oral speech is always addressed to some-
one, the recipient, who should be able to hear the speaker. The immediate
presence of that recipient becomes substantially less important for com-
munication in print. Moreover, simultaneously, print can extend the
audience, within and across generations, to which the communication is
addressed. Importantly, texting does not assume the continuous presence
of the audience, and it reaches the entire population through the usage of
devices that can receive text (e.g., mobile phones). Importantly, as “the
coverage” of communication expands, the complexity of the acquisition
process to master that particular type of language also increases. As the
acquisition of spoken language arguably requires only exposure and con-
stant immersion, the acquisition of written language requires lengthy
structured instructions, and the acquisition of messaging requires not
 1 The Never-Ending Innovativeness of Homo Sapiens 15

only the mastery of written language but also the mastery of the device
making messaging possible.

Biological Bases
Spoken Language

It has been disputed by many that language is largely a cultural innova-

tion that refurbishes pre-existing neurocognitive functions, inducing
substantial alterations to the functional characteristics of the brain
(Bourguignon, 2022). Yet, although dominant, this position is not the
only one; there is an important continuum of relevant views.
At one end of the continuum, the mind is said to be a structure that
includes separate, highly centralized systems inclusive of lower- and
higher-order skills. According to this position (Friederici, 2018), only
humans possess a biologically predetermined system of rules and opera-
tions that permit the combination of words into hierarchically structured
phrases and sentences. This capacity, furthermore, reduces to a basic
computational mechanism—“Merge”—that binds elements into a hier-
archical structure. The brain’s Brodmann area 44, BA 44, has been stated
to be the critical cortical region supporting Merge (Friederici, 2018).
BA44 is interconnected with the temporal cortex via the dorsal arcuate
fasciculus, which develops in mid-to-late childhood to support language
proficiency, uniquely distinguishing Homo sapiens as a species
(Rauschecker, 2018). This position and its variations have been criticized
as the “required” architecture for language (Bourguignon, 2022). It has
also been stated that these views necessitate the presence of differential
evolutionary trajectories for each contributing system, which is at odds
with the near-instantaneous fluorescence of human cognition suggested
by the anthropological record (Tattersall, 2017).
On the other end, the mind is debated as a complex emergent system
that arose from interactions between ontologically distinct lower-order
constituents (Macwhinney, 1998); such a system’s characteristics are not
entirely predictable from the sum of its parts (Bunge, 1977). The
16 E. L. Grigorenko

supporters of this position (Hagoort, 2018) are skeptical that much

hinges on whether a language-related neural activity is situated in BA44
or any other Brodmann-style brain areas. They contend that the neuro-
biological mechanism of language can be elicited through multiple func-
tions rather than structural levels, from the local properties of canonical
microcircuits in the neocortex to the large-scale networks supporting lan-
guage function across the human brain (Mars et al., 2018). There are
several advantages of the emergent over centralized computation, includ-
ing reduced costs of handling and joint running of individual cognitive
processes, faster information transfer at the systems level, increased adapt-
ability, and equitable resource allocation (Crutchfield & Mitchell, 1995).
Importantly, it has been stated that the evolutionary stance will be of
limited value until we have mechanistic computational accounts of this
multi-level processing architecture. (Hagoort, 2018).
The lack of specificity, at least at this point, differentiates the “talking
brain” of the wise man from either the brains of his evolutionary prede-
cessors structurally or from an engagement of different brain areas func-
tionally. For example, when the wise man does not speak but engages in
a different cognitive activity, it is echoed in the lack of specificity related
to the human genome. Similarly, the “talking” genome of the wise man
differs by only 1% from the nontalking apes. The early promotion of
FOXP2 as an evolutionary vehicle of the emergence of human language
or as the grammar gene (Pinker, 1994) was unsupported by later work
(Atkinson et al., 2018). Regarding the former, the gene network analyses
from ancestral human DNA have focused on the coding regions that lie
next to or interact with the FOXP2 gene, revealing new information.
Such comparative studies (Kuhlwilm, 2018) identify gene “deserts” or
deletions arising after different “admixture events” where archaic hom-
inin lineages (Neanderthal and Denisovan) interbred with the ancestors
of modern humans. Interestingly, the modern human genome, perhaps
as a result of such events, eliminated the resulting genomic changes from
particular regions. The region around FOXP2 is one of such deserts. This
pattern, in turn, indicates a discordancy between humans and their
archaic relatives in this region. With regard to the latter, at this point,
there are multiple different genes, the variation which has been associated
in different studies with an individual difference in language acquisition
 1 The Never-Ending Innovativeness of Homo Sapiens 17

and performance (Mountford et al., 2022). However, none of them have

been elevated to the status of players, with clearly elucidated functions
within a system orchestrating or contributing to the biological force
underlying the acquisition and manifestation of language.
Correspondingly, there are genes that were initially associated with other
skills, such as enhanced social and communicative skills—factors
undoubtedly critical to the emergence of human language. For example,
treating FOXP2 as one well-studied example, it is important to underpin
aspects of verbal communication by relating differences in vocal output
across primate species to variations in FOXP2 expression (Staes et al.,
2018). This line of research emphasizes the importance of the genes that
are understudied, but the variation which has been associated with the
regulation of social behavior also varies across humans and apes, includ-
ing those linked to social communication, pro-sociality, and cooperation.

Written Language

Historically, the theories of the “writing and reading brain” had devel-
oped substantially later than those of the “talking brain.” Correspondingly,
the stream of thought has been based on a substantially different notion
of what the human brain is like and how it masters new cognitive func-
tions. Specifically, instead of looking for the particular brain loci where
written language resides, largely, these theories are characterized by emer-
gence, where writing and reading skills arise from systems initially geared
toward other functions, such as visual recognition and spatial attention,
respectively (Dehaene & Cohen, 2007).
When learning to read, a beginning reader must connect spoken and
written language by associating the phonological structure of speech with
symbolic units of print: first at a sublexical level and then in larger and
larger units, such as syllables, words, and word combinations (Liberman,
1996). Learning to read is easier (and faster) in orthographies in which
symbols map consistently onto particular sounds (e.g., Finnish or
Spanish) than in English, in which letters and their combinations repre-
sent different sounds depending on a word’s context. Repeated practice of
the reading skill leads to the skill’s automatization, resulting in rapid
18 E. L. Grigorenko

lexical processing and immediate orthographic access to meaning. The

early sublexical processing engages a dorsal or higher route through the
brain from the back of the brain, originating in the areas where visual
processing occurs and moving forward toward the frontal lobes where
meaning is assigned. The sublexical pathway going through the middle
temporal and inferior parietal regions is indirect and inefficient for access-
ing meaning, yet this is the only way a beginning reader can assign mean-
ing to the printed words. The lexical, ventral, or lower system for reading
gets assembled in parallel but engages the left occipito-temporal region of
the brain and takes advantage of an existing evolutionary system for
visual processing, recycling the brain structures that have been utilized
for different purposes. As soon as the beginning reader learns how to
make sense of words as visual forms loaded with meaning, this ventral
system begins to self-organize as a rapid orthographic processor based
primarily on the statistical properties by which letters and letter combi-
nations occur and ongoing exposure to print (Dehaene et al., 2015). If
access to print is challenged or delayed, both systems do not receive the
early practice needed to crystallize and automatize the skill of reading
optimally. Based on the notion of these two brain systems, it is possible
to predict where differences between struggling and proficient readers
may arise. Thus, there are registered differences in the brain region size,
thickness, or the white matter fiber bundles that connect the reading
brain regions to one another (Williams et al., 2018). There is also evi-
dence that struggling readers engage these reading-related brain regions
less than their non-struggling peers do. Thus, it is important to under-
stand how the reading brain changes over age or with skill change, the
impact of learning gains or loss, and the impact of genetic risk or instruc-
tional approach on the reading brain.
Indeed, there is substantial evidence substantiating the presence of
genetic risk in those individuals who experience difficulties with acquir-
ing reading skills. Yet, there is consensus that there is no causal gene(s)
triggering the manifestation of these difficulties; it is likely that many
hundreds of quantitative trait loci (QTL, which are regions of the genome
at which genetic variation is associated with a particular quantitative
trait) of small effect size (<1%) contribute to these difficulties. Moreover,
although a recent genome-wide association study (GWAS, which is an
Another random document with
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 Still Olivia kept silent and it was the old man who answered Aunt
Cassie. “He wanted to be buried here.... He wrote to ask me, when he was
dying.”
“He had no right to make such a request. He forfeited all rights by his
behavior. I say it again and I’ll keep on saying it. He ought never to have
been brought back here ... after people even forgot whether he was alive or
dead.”
The perilous calm had settled over Olivia.... She had been looking out of
the window across the marshes into the distance, and when she turned she
spoke with a terrible quietness. She said: “You may do with Horace
Pentland’s body what you like. It is more your affair than mine, for I never
saw him in my life. But it is my son who is dead ... my son, who belongs to
me more than to any of you. You may bury Horace Pentland on the same
day ... at the same service, even in the same grave. Things like that can’t
matter very much after death. You can’t go on pretending forever.... Death
is too strong for that. It’s stronger than any of us puny creatures because it’s
the one truth we can’t avoid. It’s got nothing to do with prejudices and pride
and respectability. In a hundred years—even in a year, in a month, what will
it matter what we’ve done with Horace Pentland’s body?”
She rose, still enveloped in the perilous calm, and said: “I’ll leave
Horace Pentland to you two. There is none of his blood in my veins.
Whatever you do, I shall not object ... only I wouldn’t be too shabby in
dealing with death.”
She went out, leaving Aunt Cassie exhausted and breathless and
confused. The old woman had won her battle about the burial of Horace
Pentland, yet she had suffered a great defeat. She must have seen that she
had really lost everything, for Olivia somehow had gone to the root of
things, in the presence of John Pentland, who was himself so near to death.
(Olivia daring to say proudly, as if she actually scorned the Pentland name,
“There is none of his blood in my veins.”)
But it was a defeat which Olivia knew she would never admit: that was
one of the qualities which made it impossible to deal with Aunt Cassie.
Perhaps, even as she sat there dabbing at her eyes, she was choosing new
weapons for a struggle which had come at last into the open because it was
impossible any longer to do battle through so weak and shifting an ally as
Anson.
 She was a natural martyr, Aunt Cassie. Martyrdom was the great
feminine weapon of her Victorian day and she was practised in it; she had
learned all its subtleties in the years she had lain wrapped in a shawl on a
sofa subduing the full-blooded Mr. Struthers.
And Olivia knew as she left the room that in the future she would have
to deal with a poor, abused, invalid aunt who gave all her strength in doing
good works and received in return only cruelty and heartlessness from an
outsider, from an intruder, a kind of adventuress who had wormed her way
into the heart of the Pentland family. Aunt Cassie, by a kind of art of which
she possessed the secret, would somehow make it all seem so.
2

The heat did not go away. It hung in a quivering cloud over the whole
countryside, enveloping the black procession which moved through the
lanes into the highroad and thence through the clusters of ugly stucco
bungalows inhabited by the mill-workers, on its way past the deserted
meeting-house where Preserved Pentland had once harangued a tough and
sturdy congregation and the Rev. Josiah Milford had set out with his flock
for the Western Reserve.... It enveloped the black, slow-moving procession
to the very doors of the cool, ivy-covered stone church (built like a stage
piece to imitate some English county church) where the Pentlands
worshiped the more polite, compromising gods scorned and berated by the
witch-burner. On the way, beneath the elms of High Street, Polish women
and children stopped to stare and cross themselves at the sight of the grand
procession.
The little church seemed peaceful after the heat and the stir of the
Durham street, peaceful and hushed and crowded to the doors by the
relatives and connections of the family. Even the back pews were filled by
the poor half-forgotten remnants of the family who had no wealth to carry
them smoothly along the stream of life. Old Mrs. Featherstone (who did
washing) was there sobbing because she sobbed at all funerals, and old
Miss Haddon, the genteel Pentland cousin, dressed even in the midst of
summer in her inevitable cape of thick black broadcloth, and Mrs. Malson,
shabby-genteel in her foulards and high-pitched bonnet, and Miss
Murgatroyd whose bullfinch house was now “Ye Witch’s Broome” where
one got bad tea and melancholy sandwiches....
 Together Bishop Smallwood and Aunt Cassie had planned a service
calculated skilfully to harrow the feelings and give full scope to the vast
emotional capacities of their generation and background.
They chose the most emotional of hymns, and Bishop Smallwood,
renowned for his effect upon pious and sentimental old ladies, said a few
insincere and pompous words which threw Aunt Cassie and poor old Mrs.
Featherstone into fresh excesses of grief. The services for the boy became a
barbaric rite dedicated not to his brief and pathetic existence but to a
glorification of the name he bore and of all those traits—the narrowness, the
snobbery, the lower middle-class respect for property—which had
culminated in the lingering tragedy of his sickly life. In their respective
pews Anson and Aunt Cassie swelled with pride at the mention of the
Pentland ancestry. Even the sight of the vigorous, practical, stocky Polish
women staring round-eyed at the funeral procession a little before, returned
to them now in a wave of pride and secret elation. The same emotion in
some way filtered back through the little church from the pulpit where
Bishop Smallwood (with the sob in his voice which had won him prizes at
the seminary) stood surrounded by midsummer flowers, through all the
relatives and connections, until far in the back among the more obscure and
remote ones it became simply a pride in their relation to New England and
the ancient dying village that was fast disappearing beneath the inroads of a
more vigorous world. Something of the Pentland enchantment engulfed
them all, even old Mrs. Featherstone, with her poor back bent from washing
to support the four defective grandchildren who ought never to have been
born. Through her facile tears (she wept because it was the only pleasure
left her) there shone the light of a pride in belonging to these people who
had persecuted witches and evolved transcendentalism and Mr. Lowell and
Doctor Holmes and the good, kind Mr. Longfellow. It raised her somehow
above the level of those hardy foreigners who worshiped the Scarlet Woman
of Rome and jostled her on the sidewalks of High Street.
In all the little church there were only two or three, perhaps, who
escaped that sudden mystical surge of self-satisfaction.... O’Hara, who was
forever outside the caste, and Olivia and old John Pentland, sitting there
side by side so filled with sorrow that they did not even resent the antics of
Bishop Smallwood. Sabine (who had come, after all, to the services) sensed
the intensity of the engulfing emotion. It filled her with a sense of slow,
cold, impotent rage.
 As the little procession left the church, wiping its eyes and murmuring in
lugubrious tones, the clouds which a little earlier had sprung up against the
distant horizon began to darken the whole sky. The air became so still that
the leaves on the tall, drooping elms hung as motionless as leaves in a
painted picture, and far away, gently at first, and then with a slow,
increasing menace, rose the sound of distant echoing thunder. Ill at ease, the
mourners gathered in little groups about the steps, regarding alternately the
threatening sky and the waiting hearse, and presently, one by one, the more
timorous ones began to drift sheepishly away. Others followed them slowly
until by the time the coffin was borne out, they had all melted away save for
the members of the “immediate family” and one or two others. Sabine
remained, and O’Hara and old Mrs. Soames (leaning on John Pentland’s
arm as if it were her grandson who was dead), and old Miss Haddon in her
black cape, and the pall-bearers, and of course Bishop Smallwood and the
country rector who, in the presence of this august and saintly pillar of the
church, had faded to insignificance. Besides these there were one or two
other relatives, like Struthers Pentland, a fussy little bald man (cousin of
John Pentland and of the disgraceful Horace), who had never married but
devoted himself instead to fathering the boys of his classes at Harvard.
It was this little group which entered the motors and hurried off after the
hearse in its shameless race with the oncoming storm.

The town burial-ground lay at the top of a high, bald hill where the first
settlers of Durham had chosen to dispose of their dead, and the ancient
roadway that led up to it was far too steep and stony to permit the passing
of motors, so that part way up the hill the party was forced to descend and
make the remainder of the journey on foot. As they assembled, silently but
in haste, about the open, waiting grave, the sound of the thunder
accompanied now by wild flashes of lightning, drew nearer and nearer, and
the leaves of the stunted trees and shrubs which a moment before had been
so still, began to dance and shake madly in the green light that preceded the
storm.
Bishop Smallwood, by nature a timorous man, stood beside the grave
opening his jewel-encrusted Prayer Book (he was very High Church and
fond of incense and precious stones) and fingering the pages nervously,
now looking down at them, now regarding the stolid Polish grave-diggers
who stood about waiting to bury the last of the Pentlands. There were
irritating small delays, but at last everything was ready and the Bishop,
reading as hastily as he dared, began the service in a voice less rich and
theatrical than usual.
“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord....”
And what followed was lost in a violent crash of thunder so that the
Bishop was able to omit a line or two without being discovered. The few
trees on the bald hill began to sway and rock, bending low toward the earth,
and the crape veils of the women performed wild black writhings. In the
uproar of wind and thunder only a sentence or two of the service became
audible....
“For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that the
past is as a watch in the night....”
And then again a wild, angry Nature took possession of the services,
drowning out the anxious voice of the Bishop and the loud theatrical sobs of
Aunt Cassie, and again there was a sudden breathless hush and the sound of
the Bishop’s voice, so pitiful and insignificant in the midst of the storm,
reading....
“O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto
wisdom.”
And again:
“For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God in His Providence to take
out of the world the soul of our deceased brother.”
And at last, with relief, the feeble, reedlike voice, repeating with less
monotony than usual: “The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of
God and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all evermore. Amen.”
Sabine, in whose hard nature there lay some hidden thing which exulted
in storms, barely heard the service. She stood there watching the wild
beauty of the sky and the distant sea and the marshes and thinking how
different a thing the burial of the first Pentland must have been from the
timorous, hurried rite that marked the passing of the last. She kept seeing
those first fanatical, hard-faced, rugged Puritans standing above their tombs
like ghosts watching ironically the genteel figure of the Apostle to the
Genteel and his jeweled Prayer Book....
 The Polish grave-diggers set about their work stolidly indifferent to the
storm, and before the first motor had started down the steep and stony path,
the rain came with a wild, insane violence, sweeping inward in a wall
across the sea and the black marshes. Sabine, at the door of her motor,
raised her head and breathed deeply, as if the savage, destructive force of
the storm filled her with a kind of ecstasy.

On the following day, cool after the storm and bright and clear, a second
procession made its way up the stony path to the top of the bald hill, only
this time Bishop Smallwood was not there, nor Cousin Struthers Pentland,
for they had both been called away suddenly and mysteriously. And Anson
Pentland was not there because he would have nothing to do with a
blackguard like Horace Pentland, even in death. In the little group about the
open grave stood Olivia and John Pentland and Aunt Cassie, who had come
because, after all, the dead man’s name was Pentland, and Miss Haddon, (in
her heavy broadcloth cape), who never missed any funeral and had learned
about this one from her friend, the undertaker, who kept her perpetually au
courant. There were not even any friends to carry the coffin to the grave,
and so this labor was divided between the undertaker’s men and the grave-
diggers....
And the service began again, read this time by the rector, who since the
departure of the Bishop seemed to have grown a foot in stature....
“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord....
“For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that is
past as a watch in the night....
“O teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto
wisdom.”
Aunt Cassie wept again, though the performance was less good than on
the day before, but Olivia and John Pentland stood in silence while Horace
Pentland was buried at last in the midst of that little colony of grim and
respectable dead.
Sabine was there, too, standing at a little distance, as if she had a
contempt for all funerals. She had known Horace Pentland in life and she
had gone to see him in his long exile whenever her wanderings led her to
the south of France, less from affection than because it irritated the others in
the family. (He must have been happier in that warm, rich country than he
could ever have been in this cold, stony land.) But she had come to-day less
for sentimental reasons than because it gave her the opportunity of a
triumph over Aunt Cassie. She could watch Aunt Cassie out of her cold
green eyes while they all stood about to bury the family skeleton. Sabine,
who had not been to a funeral in the twenty-five years since her father’s
death, had climbed the stony hill to the Durham town burial-ground twice in
as many days....
The rector was speaking again....
“The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the
Fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all evermore. Amen.”
The little group turned away in silence, and in silence disappeared over
the rim of the hill down the steep path. The secret burial was finished and
Horace Pentland was left alone with the Polish grave-diggers, come home
at last.
3

The peace which had taken possession of Olivia as she sat alone by the
side of her dead son, returned to her slowly with the passing of the
excitement over the funeral. Indeed, she was for once thankful for the
listless, futile enchantment which invested the quiet old world. It soothed
her at a moment when, all interest having departed from life, she wanted
merely to be left in peace. She came to see for a certainty that there was no
tragedy in her son’s death; the only tragedy had been that he had ever lived
at all such a baffled, painful, hopeless existence. And now, after so many
years of anxiety, there was peace and a relaxation that seemed strange and
in a way delicious ... moments when, lying in the chaise longue by the
window overlooking the marshes, she was enveloped by deep and healing
solitude. Even the visits of Aunt Cassie, who would have forced her way
into Olivia’s room in the interests of “duty,” made only a vague, dreamlike
impression. The old lady became more and more a droning, busy insect, the
sound of whose buzzing grew daily more distant and vague, like the sound
of a fly against a window-pane heard through veils of sleep.
From her window she sometimes had a distant view of the old man,
riding alone now, in the trap across the fields behind the old white horse,
and sometimes she caught a glimpse of his lean figure riding the savage red
mare along the lanes. He no longer went alone with the mare; he had
yielded to Higgins’ insistent warnings of her bad temper and permitted the
groom to go with him, always at his side or a little behind to guard him,
riding a polo pony with an ease and grace which made horse and man seem
a single creature ... a kind of centaur. On a horse the ugliness of the robust,
animal little man seemed to flow away. It was as if he had been born thus,
on a horse, and was awkward and ill at ease with his feet on the earth.
And Olivia knew the thought that was always in the mind of her father-
in-law as he rode across the stony, barren fields. He was thinking all the
while that all this land, all this fortune, even Aunt Cassie’s carefully tended
pile, would one day belong to a family of some other name, perhaps a name
which he had never even heard.
There were no more Pentlands. Sybil and her husband would be rich,
enormously so, with the Pentland money and Olivia’s money ... but there
would never be any more Pentlands. It had all come to an end in this ...
futility and oblivion. In another hundred years the name would exist, if it
existed at all, only as a memory, embalmed within the pages of Anson’s
book.
The new melancholy which settled over the house came in the end even
to touch the spirit of Sybil, so young and so eager for experience, like a
noxious mildew. Olivia noticed it first in a certain shadowy listlessness that
seemed to touch every action of the girl, and then in an occasional faint sigh
of weariness, and in the visits the girl paid her in her room, and in the way
she gave up willingly evenings at Brook Cottage to stay at home with her
mother. She saw that Sybil, who had always been so eager, was touched by
the sense of futility which she (Olivia) had battled for so long. And Sybil,
Sybil of them all, alone possessed the chance of being saved.
She thought, “I must not come to lean on her. I must not be the sort of
mother who spoils the life of her child.”
And when John Pentland came to sit listlessly by her side, sometimes in
silence, sometimes making empty speeches that meant nothing in an effort
to cover his despair, she saw that he, too, had come to her for the strength
which she alone could give him. Even old Mrs. Soames had failed him, for
she lay ill again and able to see him only for a few minutes each day. (It
was Sabine’s opinion, uttered during one of her morning visits, that these
strange sudden illnesses came from overdoses of drugs.)
 So she came to see that she was being a coward to abandon the struggle
now, and she rose one morning almost at dawn to put on her riding-clothes
and set out with Sybil across the wet meadows to meet O’Hara. She
returned with something of her pallor gone and a manner almost of gaiety,
her spirit heightened by the air, the contact with O’Hara and the sense of
having taken up the struggle once more.
Sabine, always watchful, noticed the difference and put it down to the
presence of O’Hara alone, and in this she was not far wrong, for set down
there in Durham, he affected Olivia powerfully as one who had no past but
only a future. With him she could talk of things which lay ahead—of his
plans for the farm he had bought, of Sybil’s future, of his own reckless,
irresistible career.

O’Hara himself had come to a dangerous state of mind. He was one of

those men who seek fame and success less for the actual rewards than for
the satisfaction of the struggle, the fierce pleasure of winning with all the
chances against one. He had won successes already. He had his house, his
horses, his motor, his well-tailored clothes, and he knew the value of these
things, not only in the world of Durham, but in the slums and along the
wharves of Boston. He had no illusions about the imperfect workings of
democracy. He knew (perhaps because, having begun at the very bottom, he
had fought his way very near to the top) that the poor man expects a
politician to be something of a splendorous affair, especially when he has
begun his career as a very common and ordinary sort of poor man. O’Hara
was not playing his game foolishly or recklessly. When he visited the slums
or sat in at political meetings, he was a sort of universal common man, a
brother to all. When he addressed a large meeting or presided at an
assembly, he arrived in a glittering motor and appeared in the elegant
clothes suitable to a representative of the government, of power; and so he
reflected credit on those men who had played with him as boys along India
Wharf and satisfied the universal hunger in man for something more
splendorous than the machinery of a perfect democracy.
He understood the game perfectly and made no mistakes, for he had had
the best of all training—that of knowing all sorts of people in all sorts of
conditions. In himself, he embodied them all, if the simple and wholly
kindly and honest were omitted; for he was really not a simple man nor a
wholly honest one and he was too ruthless to be kindly. He understood
people (as Sabine had guessed), with their little prides and vanities and
failings and ambitions.
Aunt Cassie and Anson in the rigidity of their minds had been unjust in
thinking that their world was the goal of his ambitions. They had, in the
way of those who depend on their environment as a justification for their
own existence, placed upon it a value out of all proportion in the case of a
man like O’Hara. To them it was everything, the ultimate to be sought on
this earth, and so they supposed it must seem to O’Hara. It would have been
impossible for them to believe that he considered it only as a small part of
his large scheme of life and laid siege to it principally for the pleasure that
he found in the battle; for it was true that O’Hara, once he had won, would
not know what to do with the fruits of his victory.
Already he himself had begun to see this. He had begun to understand
that the victory was so easy that the battle held little savor for him.
Moments of satisfaction such as that which had overtaken him as he sat
talking to Sabine were growing more and more rare ... moments when he
would stop and think, “Here am I, Michael O’Hara, a nobody ... son of a
laborer and a housemaid, settled in the midst of such a world as Durham,
talking to such a woman as Mrs. Cane Callendar.”
No, the savor was beginning to fail, to go out of the struggle. He was
beginning to be bored, and as he grew bored he grew also restless and
unhappy.
Born in the Roman Catholic church, he was really neither a very
religious nor a very superstitious man. He was skeptic enough not to believe
all the faiths the church sought to impose upon him, yet he was not skeptic
enough to find peace of mind in an artificial will to believe. For so long a
time he had relied wholly upon himself that the idea of leaning for support,
even in lonely, restless moments, upon a God or a church, never even
occurred to him. He remained outwardly a Roman Catholic because by
denying the faith he would have incurred the enmity of the church and
many thousands of devout Irish and Italians. The problem simply did not
concern him deeply one way or the other.
And so he had come, guided for the moment by no very strong passion,
into the doldrums of confusion and boredom. Even his fellow-politicians in
Boston saw the change in him and complained that he displayed no very
great interest in the campaign to send him to Congress. He behaved at times
as if it made not the slightest difference to him whether he was elected to
Congress or not ... he, this Michael O’Hara who was so valuable to his
party, so engaging and shrewd, who could win for it almost anything he
chose.
And though he took care that no one should divine it, this strange state of
mind troubled him more deeply than any of his friends. He was assailed by
the certainty that there was something lacking from his life, something very
close to the foundations. Now that he was inactive and bored, he had begun
to think of himself for the first time. The fine, glorious burst of first youth,
when everything seemed part of a splendid game, was over and done now,
and he felt himself slipping away toward the borderland of middle-age.
Because he was a man of energy and passion, who loved life, he felt the
change with a keen sense of sadness. There was a kind of horror for him in
the idea of a lowered tempo of life—a fear that filled him at times with a
passionately satisfactory sort of Gaelic melancholy.
In such moments, he had quite honestly taken stock of all he possessed,
and found the amassed result bitterly unsatisfactory. He had a good enough
record. He was decidedly more honorable than most men in such a dirty
business as politics—indeed, far more honorable and freer from spites and
nastinesses than many of those who had come out of this very sacred
Durham world. He had made enough money in the course of his career, and
he was winning his battle in Durham. Yet at thirty-five life had begun to
slacken, to lose some of that zest which once had led him to rise every
morning bursting with animal spirits, his brain all a-glitter with fascinating
schemes.
And then, in the very midst of this perilous state of mind, he discovered
one morning that the old sensation of delight at rising had returned to him,
only it was not because his brain was filled with fascinating schemes. He
arose with an interest in life because he knew that in a little while he would
see Olivia Pentland. He arose, eager to fling himself on his horse and,
riding across the meadows, to wait by the abandoned gravel-pit until he saw
her coming over the dew-covered fields, radiant, it seemed to him, as the
morning itself. On the days when she did not come it was as if the bottom
had dropped out of his whole existence.
 It was not that he was a man encountering the idea of woman for the first
time. There had been women in his life always, since the very first
bedraggled Italian girl he had met as a boy among the piles of lumber along
the wharves. There had been women always because it was impossible for a
man so vigorous and full of zest, so ruthless and so scornful, to have lived
thirty-five years without them, and because he was an attractive man, filled
when he chose to be, with guile and charm, whom women found it difficult
to resist. There had been plenty of women, kept always in the background,
treated as a necessity and prevented skilfully from interfering with the more
important business of making a career.
But with Olivia Pentland, something new and disturbing had happened
to him ... something which, in his eagerness to encompass all life and
experience, possessed an overwhelming sensuous fascination. She was not
simply another woman in a procession of considerable length. Olivia
Pentland, he found, was different from any of the others ... a woman of
maturity, poised, beautiful, charming and intelligent, and besides all these
things she possessed for him a kind of fresh and iridescent bloom, the same
freshness, only a little saddened, that touched her young daughter.
In the beginning, when they had talked together while she planned the
garden at Brook Cottage, he had found himself watching her, lost in a kind
of wonder, so that he scarcely understood what she was saying. And all the
while he kept thinking, “Here is a wonderful woman ... the most wonderful
I’ve ever seen or will ever see again ... a woman who could make life a
different affair for me, who would make of love something which people
say it is.”
She had affected him thus in a way that swept aside all the vulgar and
cynical coarseness with which a man of such experience is likely to invest
the whole idea of woman. Until now women had seemed to him made to
entertain men or to provide children for them, and now he saw that there
was, after all, something in this sentiment with which people surrounded a
love affair. For a long time he searched for a word to describe Olivia and in
the end he fell back upon the old well-worn one which she always brought
to mind. She was a “lady”—and as such she had an overwhelming effect
upon his imagination.
He had said to himself that here was a woman who could understand
him, not in the aloof, analytical fashion of a clever woman like Sabine
Callendar, but in quite another way. She was a woman to whom he could
say, “I am thus and so. My life has been of this kind. My motives are of this
sort,” and she would understand, the bad with the good. She would be the
one person in the world to whom he could pour out the whole burden of
secrets, the one woman who could ever destroy the weary sense of
loneliness which sometimes afflicted him. She made him feel that, for all
his shrewdness and hard-headed scheming, she was far wiser than he would
ever be, that in a way he was a small boy who might come to her and,
burying his head in her lap, have her stroke his thick black hair. She would
understand that there were times when a man wanted to be treated thus. In
her quiet way she was a strong woman, unselfish, too, who did not feed
upon flattery and perpetual attention, the sort of woman who is precious to
a man bent upon a career. The thought of her filled him with a poignant
feeling of sadness, but in his less romantic moments he saw, too, that she
held the power of catching him up out of his growing boredom. She would
be of great value to him.
And so Sabine had not been far wrong when she thought of him as the
small boy sitting on the curbstone who had looked up at her gravely and
said, “I’m playing.” He was at times very like such an image.
But in the end he was always brought up abruptly against the hard reality
of the fact that she was already married to a man who did not want her
himself but who would never set her free, a man who perhaps would have
sacrificed everything in the world to save a scandal in his family. And
beyond these hard, tangible difficulties he discerned, too, the whole dark
decaying web, less obvious but none the less potent, in which she had
become enmeshed.
Yet these obstacles only created a fascination to a mind so complex, so
perverse, for in the solitude of his mind and in the bitterness of the long
struggle he had known, he came to hold the whole world in contempt and
saw no reason why he should not take what he wanted from this Durham
world. Obstacles such as these provided the material for a new battle, a new
source of interest in the turbulent stream of his existence; only this time
there was a difference ... that he coveted the prize itself more than the
struggle. He wanted Olivia Pentland, strangely enough, not for a moment or
even for a month or a year, but for always.
 He waited because he understood, in the shrewdness of his long
experience, that to be insistent would only startle such a woman and cause
him to lose her entirely, and because he knew of no plan of action which
could overcome the obstacles which kept them apart. He waited, as he had
done many times in his career, for circumstances to solve themselves. And
while he waited, with each time that he saw her she grew more and more
desirable, and his own invincible sense of caution became weaker and
weaker.
4

In those long days spent in her room, Olivia had come slowly to be
aware of the presence of the newcomer at Brook Cottage. It had begun on
the night of Jack’s death with the sound of his music drifting across the
marshes, and after the funeral Sabine had talked of him to Olivia with an
enthusiasm curiously foreign to her. Once or twice she had caught a glimpse
of him crossing the meadows toward O’Hara’s shining chimneys or going
down the road that led through the marshes to the sea—a tall, red-haired
young man who walked with a slight limp. Sybil, she found, was strangely
silent about him, but when she questioned the girl about her plans for the
day she found, more often than not, that they had to do with him. When she
spoke of him, Sybil had a way of blushing and saying, “He’s very nice,
Mother. I’ll bring him over when you want to see people.... I used to know
him in Paris.”
And Olivia, wisely, did not press her questions. Besides, Sabine had told
her almost all there was to know ... perhaps more than Sybil herself knew.
Sabine said, “He belongs to a rather remarkable family ... wilful,
reckless and full of spirit. His mother is probably the most remarkable of
them all. She’s a charming woman who has lived luxuriously in Paris most
of her life ... not one of the American colony. She doesn’t ape any one and
she’s incapable of pretense of any sort. She’s lived, rather alone, over there
on money ... quite a lot of money ... which seems to come out of steel-mills
in some dirty town of the Middle West. She’s one of my great friends ... a
woman of no intellect, but very beautiful and blessed with a devastating
charm. She is one of the women who was born for men.... She’s irresistible
to them, and I imagine there have been men in her life always. She was
made for men, but her taste is perfect, so her morals don’t matter.”
 The woman ... indeed all Jean de Cyon’s family ... seemed to fascinate
Sabine as she sat having tea with Olivia, for she went on and on, talking far
more than usual, describing the house of Jean’s mother, her friends, the
people whom one met at her dinners, all there was to tell about her.
“She’s the sort of woman who has existed since the beginning of time.
There’s some mystery about her early life. It has something to do with
Jean’s father. I don’t think she was happy with him. He’s never mentioned.
Of course, she’s married again now to a Frenchman ... much older than
herself ... a man, very distinguished, who has been in three cabinets. That’s
where the boy gets his French name. The old man has adopted him and
treats him like his own son. De Cyon is a good name in France, one of the
best; but of course Jean hasn’t any French blood. He’s pure American, but
he’s never seen his own country until now.”
Sabine finished her tea and putting her cup back on the Regence table
(which had come from Olivia’s mother and so found its graceful way into a
house filled with stiff early American things), she added, “It’s a remarkable
family ... wild and restless. Jean had an aunt who died in the Carmelite
convent at Lisieux, and his cousin is Lilli Barr ... a really great musician.”
She looked out of the window and after a moment said in a low voice, “Lilli
Barr is the woman whom my husband married ... but she divorced him, too,
and now we are friends ... she and I.” The familiar hard, metallic laugh
returned and she added, “I imagine our experience with him made us
sympathetic.... You see, I know the family very well. It’s the sort of blood
which produces people with a genius for life ... for living in the moment.”
She did not say that Jean and his mother and the ruthless cousin Lilli
Barr fascinated her because they stood in a way for the freedom toward
which she had been struggling through all the years since she escaped from
Durham. They were free in a way from countries, from towns, from laws,
from prejudices, even in a way from nationality. She had hoped once that
Jean might interest himself in her own sullen, independent, clever Thérèse,
but in her knowledge of the world she had long ago abandoned that hope,
knowing that a boy so violent and romantic, so influenced by an upbringing
among Frenchmen, a youth so completely masculine, was certain to seek a
girl more soft and gentle and feminine than Thérèse. She knew it was
inevitable that he should fall in love with a girl like Sybil, and in a way she
was content because it fell in admirably with her own indolent plans. The
Pentlands were certain to look upon Jean de Cyon as a sort of gipsy, and
when they knew the whole truth....
The speculation fascinated her. The summer in Durham, even with the
shadow of Jack’s death flung across it, was not proving as dreadful as she
had feared; and this new development interested her as something she had
never before observed ... an idyllic love affair between two young people
who each seemed to her a perfect, charming creature.
5

It had all begun on the day nearly a year earlier when all Paris was
celebrating the anniversary of the Armistice, and in the morning Sybil had
gone with Thérèse and Sabine to lay a wreath beside the flame at the Arc de
Triomphe (for the war was one of the unaccountable things about which
Sabine chose to make a display of sentiment). And afterward she played in
the garden with the dogs which they would not let her keep at the school in
Saint-Cloud, and then she had gone into the house to find there a
fascinating and beautiful woman of perhaps fifty—a Madame de Cyon, who
had come to lunch, with her son, a young man of twenty-four, tall, straight
and slender, with red hair and dark blue eyes and a deep, pleasant voice. On
account of the day he was dressed in his cuirassier’s uniform of black and
silver, and because of an old wound he walked with a slight limp. Almost at
once (she remembered this when she thought of him) he had looked at her
in a frank, admiring way which gave her a sense of pleasurable excitement
wholly new in her experience.
Something in the sight of the uniform, or perhaps in the feel of the air,
the sound of the military music, the echoes of the Marseillaise and the
Sambre et Meuse, the sight of the soldiers in the street and the great Arc
with the flame burning there ... something in the feel of Paris, something
which she loved passionately, had taken possession of her. It was something
which, gathering in that moment, had settled upon the strange young man
who regarded her with such admiring eyes.
She knew vaguely that she must have fallen in love in the moment she
stood there in Sabine Callendar’s salon bowing to Lily de Cyon. The
experience had grown in intensity when, after lunch, she took him into the
garden to show him her dogs and watched him rubbing the ears of the
Doberman “Imp” and talking to the dog softly in a way which made her
know that he felt about animals as she did. He had been so pleasant in his
manner, so gentle in his bigness, so easy to talk to, as if they had always
been friends.
And then almost at once he had gone away to the Argentine, without
even seeing her again, on a trip to learn the business of cattle-raising
because he had the idea that one day he might settle himself as a rancher.
But he left behind him a vivid image which with the passing of time grew
more and more intense in the depths of a romantic nature which revolted at
the idea of Thérèse choosing a father scientifically for her child. It was an
image by which she had come, almost unconsciously, to measure other
men, even to such small details as the set of their shoulders and the way
they used their hands and the timbre of their voices. It was this she had
really meant when she said to her mother, “I know what sort of man I want
to marry. I know exactly.” She had meant, quite without knowing it, that it
must be a man like Jean de Cyon ... charming, romantic and a little wild.
She had not forgotten him, though there were moments at the school in
Saint-Cloud when she had believed she would never see him again—
moments when she was swept by a delicious sense of hopeless melancholy
in which she believed that her whole life had been blighted, and which led
her to make long and romantic entries in the diary that was kept hidden
beneath her mattress. And so as she grew more hopeless, the aura of
romance surrounding him took on colors deeper and more varied and
intense. She had grown so pale that Mademoiselle Vernueil took to dosing
her, and Thérèse accused her abruptly of having fallen in love, a thing she
denied vaguely and with overtones of romantic mystery.
And then with the return to Pentlands (a return advised by her mother on
account of Jack’s health) the image dimmed a little in the belief that even
by the wildest flights of imagination there was no chance of her seeing him
again. It became a hopeless passion; she prepared herself to forget him and,
in the wisdom of her young mind, grow accustomed to the idea of marrying
one of the tame young men who were so much more suitable and whom her
family had always known. She had watched her admirers carefully,
weighing them always against the image of the young man with red hair,
dressed in the black and silver of the cuirassiers, and beside that image they
had seemed to her—even the blond, good-looking Mannering boy—like
little boys, rather naughty and not half so old and wise as herself. She had
reconciled herself secretly and with gravity to the idea of making one of the
matches common in her world—a marriage determined by property and the
fact that her fiancé would be “the right sort of person.”
And so the whole affair had come to take on the color of a tragic
romance, to be guarded secretly. Perhaps when she was an old woman she
would tell the story to her grandchildren. She believed that whomever she
married, she would be thinking always of Jean de Cyon. It was one of those
half-comic illusions of youth in which there is more than a grain of
melancholy truth.
And then abruptly had come the news of his visit to Brook Cottage. She
still kept her secret, but not well enough to prevent her mother and Sabine
from suspecting it. She had betrayed herself first on the very night of Jack’s
death when she had said, with a sudden light in her eye, “It’s Jean de
Cyon.... I’d forgotten he was arriving to-night.” Olivia had noticed the light
because it was something which went on and on.

And at Brook Cottage young de Cyon, upset by the delay caused by the
funeral and the necessity of respecting the mourning at Pentlands, had
sulked and behaved in such a way that he would have been a nuisance to
any one save Sabine, who found amusement in the spectacle. Used to
rushing headlong toward anything he desired (as he had rushed into the
French army at seventeen and off to the Argentine nine months ago), he
turned ill-tempered and spent his days out of doors, rowing on the river and
bathing in the solitude of the great white beach. He quarreled with Thérèse,
whom he had known since she was a little girl, and tried to be as civil as
possible toward the amused Sabine.
She knew by now that he had not come to Durham through any great
interest in herself or Thérèse. She knew now how wise she had been (for the
purposes of her plan) to have included in her invitation to him the line ...
“Sybil Pentland lives on the next farm to us. You may remember her. She
lunched with us last Armistice Day.”
She saw that he rather fancied himself as a man of the world who was
being very clever in keeping his secret. He asked her about Sybil Pentland
in a casual way that was transparently artificial, and consulted her on the
lapse of time decently necessary before he broke in upon the mourning at
Pentlands, and had Miss Pentland shown any admiration for the young men
about Durham? If he had not been so charming and impatient he would
have bored Sabine to death.
The young man was afraid of only one thing ... that perhaps she had
changed in some way, that perhaps she was not in the reality as charming as
she had seemed to him in the long months of his absence. He was not
without experience (indeed, Sabine believed that he had gone to the
Argentine to escape from some Parisian complication) and he knew that
such calamitous disappointments could happen. Perhaps when he came to
know her better the glamour would fade. Perhaps she did not remember him
at all. But she seemed to him, after months of romantic brooding, the most
desirable woman he had ever seen.

It was a new world in which he discovered himself, in some way a newer

and more different world than the vast grass-covered plains from which he
had just come. People about Durham, he learned, had a way of saying that
Boston and Durham were like England, but this he put down quietly as a
kind of snobbery, because Boston and Durham weren’t like England at all,
so far as he could see; in spots Boston and Durham seemed old, but there
wasn’t the same richness, the same glamour about them. They should have
been romantic and yet they were not; they were more, it seemed to him, like
the illustrations in a school history. They were dry ... sec, he thought,
considering the French word better in this case on account of its sound.
And it wasn’t the likeness to England that he found interesting, but
rather the difference ... the bleak rawness of the countryside and the sight of
whole colonies of peoples as strange and foreign as the Czechs and Poles
providing a sort of alien background to the whole picture.
He had gone about the business of becoming acquainted with his own
country in a thorough, energetic fashion, and being a sensuous youth, filled
with a taste for colors and sounds and all the emanations of the spectacle of
life, he was acutely conscious of it.
To Sabine, he said, “You know the funny thing is that it seems to me like
coming home. It makes me feel that I belong in America ... not in Durham,
but in New York or some of those big roaring towns I’ve passed through.”
He spoke, naturally enough, not at all like an American but in the
clipped English fashion, rather swallowing his words, and now and then
with a faint trace of French intonation. His voice was deeper and richer than
the New England voices, with their way of calling Charles Street “Challs
Street” and sacred Harvard ... “Havaad.”
It was the spectacle of New York which had fascinated him more than
any other because it surpassed all his dreams of it and all the descriptions
people had given him of its immense force and barbaric splendor and the
incredible variety of tongues and people. New York, Sabine told him with a
consciousness of uttering treason, was America, far more than the sort of
life he would encounter in Durham.
As he talked to Sabine of New York, he would rise to that pitch of
excitement and enthusiasm which comes to people keenly alive. He even
confided in her that he had left Europe never to return there to live.
“It’s old country,” he said, “and if one has been brought up there, as I’ve
been, there’s no reason for going back there to live. In a way it’s a dead
world ... dead surely in comparison to the Americas. And it’s the future that
interests me ... not the past. I want to be where the most is going on ... in the
center of things.”
When he was not playing the piano wildly, or talking to Sabine, or
fussing about with Thérèse among the frogs and insects of the laboratory
she had rigged up on the glass-enclosed piazza, he was walking about the
garden in a state of suppressed excitement, turning over and over in his
young mind his own problem and the plans he had for adjusting himself in
this vigorous country. To discover it now, at the age of twenty-five, was an
exciting experience. He was beginning to understand those young
Americans he had encountered occasionally in Europe (like his cousin
Fergus Tolliver, who died in the war), who seemed so alive, so filled with a
reckless sense of adventure ... young men irresistible in such an old, tired
world, because Nature itself was on their side.
To ease his impatience he sought refuge in a furious physical activity,
rowing, swimming and driving with Sabine about the Durham countryside.
He could not walk far, on account of the trouble caused by his old wound,
but he got as far as O’Hara’s house, where he met the Irishman and they
became friends. O’Hara turned over to him a canoe and a rowing-scull and
told him that whenever his leg was better he might have a horse from his
stables.
One morning as he pulled his canoe up the muddy bank of the river after
his early exercise, he heard the sound of hoofs in the thick mud near at hand