Word: champollion
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...seems to be in the nature of genius to zero in on its purpose. In the 1790s a young French boy named Jean-Francois Champollion, the son of a bookseller, became obsessed with ancient languages--not only Latin and Greek but also Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Chaldean. According to The Linguist and the Emperor (Ballantine; 271 pages), by Daniel Meyerson, Champollion was a dreamy, solitary kid who mouthed off in class, but as a schoolboy, he assembled a 2,000-page dictionary of Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Luckily for him, French soldiers in Egypt soon discovered the Rosetta stone...
...Champollion and Fischer were lucky: they were heroes in their time. Deprived of the spotlight, genius can grow up twisted and strange. David Hahn was the child of divorced, clueless parents living in a David Lynch--perfect Michigan suburb in the mid-1990s. A loner and a compulsive tinkerer, Hahn somehow got it into his head in high school to build a nuclear reactor in his mom's potting shed, and damn if he didn't come close. In The Radioactive Boy Scout (Random House; 209 pages), Ken Silverstein describes how Hahn extracted radioactive elements from household objects--americium from...
Stories about geniuses rarely end well. Hahn wound up in the Navy, assigned to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Enterprise, but his officers wouldn't even let him tour the engine room. Champollion died at 40. Fischer never defended his world title. He declined into irascibility and then obscurity. What happened to him? A chess master once said, "Chess is not something that drives people mad. Chess is something that keeps mad people sane." Which is to say that genius may lie not only in having a gift but in lacking something crucial as well. Reading these books...
...most prominent paintings—a cityscape of Benares, snake charmers and a yogi—in the exhibit are by André Champollion. Two years after graduating from Harvard in 1902, Champollion traveled to India and created these magnificently detailed oil paintings...
...Orient to pose "the great question of the Different." For Schwab, India, and not Eqypt, was the first and essential Oriental influence to inspire the mental displacement. Schwab calls "totally erroneous" the popular assumption that the deciphering of hieroglyphics represented the critical breakthrough, attributing the traditional "prejudice" surrounding Champollion's famous discovery to glamorizing myth. Instead, he explores at length the Occidental fascination with "the Hindu soul... something like a separate sex." Schwab's retrospective vision is itself a richly dense landscape with illuminating details such as Shelley's "pantheism" and Leibnitz's "Oriental lobe." Schwab invokes, with impressive authority...