Richard Macksey at 3QD [TALENT SEARCH]

I’ve taken my Richard Macksey post from July 30, tweaked it a bit here and there, and posted it at 3 Quarks Daily: https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2019/08/it-got-adults-off-your-back-richard-macksey-remembered.html. Why repost at 3QD? Because 3QD has a much larger readership than New Savanna, and people need to know about Dick Macksey.

Macksey is one of the three smartest and most creative people I’ve ever worked with. David Hays and Zeal Greenberg are the other two. They are very different men.

Both Hays and Macksey were academics; both were polymaths and both were interested in language. Unlike Hays, Macksey never really developed a line of thought that was his own. He published a bit, read ferociously across many disciplines, but he was mostly a teacher and an editor. Hays had and published about his own lines of thought. We collaborated closely from the time I met him when I was a graduate student until he died two decades later of lung cancer.

Zeal never went to college; he was a businessman. I met him long after I’d met the other two, in fact Hays had been dead almost by the time I’d met Zeal in November of 2003 or 2004. By that time he’d retired from business and was pushing a Quixotic project he called World Island – “a permanent world’s fair for a world that’s permanently fair”. I worked quite closely with him on that project for a couple of years, but then things tapered off. But I still keep in touch.

Here’s the question: How come I believe these are the three smartest and most creative people I’ve ever worked with? What’s my criterion of judgment? There’s really no way to compare them directly. Zeal is not at all an academic and so doesn’t have the kind of learning Macksey or Hays had, though he is immensely curious and knows many things. Macksey doesn’t have a body of original thought like Hays had and Hays, though broadly learned, was not like Macksey was – no one I’ve ever met was. I have no idea how these three would compare on any of the various tests of ability, and I wouldn’t pay any attention to those numbers if I had them.

That is to say, I wouldn’t value those numbers beyond the intuitive sense I’d developed through working with these men. That would be foolish. And that’s my basis of judgement, intuition based on direct experience. I certainly don’t claim any particular objectivity for that judgement. But remember, I’m only talking about people I’ve worked with directly. As for all those other people, how would I know?

It’s a strange business, this matter of talent and ability. We just don’t know.

Addendum, a day later: Walter Freeman may be as smart and creative as Macksey, Hays, and Zeal. I had extensive email correspondence with him while I was writing Beethoven's Anvil and for a year or three after, but I didn't work with him as much as I had with the other three.