Intelligence Vs Intelligent

I’ve noticed how some people wear smartness like a general affliction of some persistent condition, a snotty nose perhaps. Some wear it like the occasional perfume that everybody asks the name of. Some others wear the serious lack of it like dehydrated souls in the desert. But what exactly goes for critically-acclaimed smart? What is intelligence, in a revised sense and is there really enough of it around?

I used to attribute intelligence to those thousand page documents on anthropomorphology and science of the third millennium (it is a real subject at the University of the Third Age. I kid you not. You must be over 65 years to enroll, though.) One would find one’s meningeal juices flowing, reading these documents I speak of, complete with footnotes, addenda and neatly acknowledged references to directors of Institutes for Scientific Research you never knew existed until someone’s farm blew up on some remote corner of the world one sunny Monday morning due to unknown causes. Intelligent ways of thinking, including not thinking at all, often lead to these interesting theories involving butterflies fluttering to cause buildings to fall, using the power of the mind to bend spoons and such other parlor tricks we used to enjoy watching on the X-Files and talk about all day. Only, now they happen in zero gravity and you would not know that unless you can play guess games with agents carrying classified files. I digress.

Until Dan Brown and Stephen King made a killing citing these incidents in the plots of their books, you could get these substantially inventive and entertaining documents as free e-book downloads. Now it only happens if you use PayPal and you’re prepared to shell out your hair-cut money for a read through. Moan. I used to believe in their original intelligence, because it takes the reach of a graspy intellect to dig patterns in nothingness, the kind of thing I used to get into during school holidays when I was a child. I used to cherish the feeling of ‘being in the know’, one among the scientific elite, while the rest of the world glossed over Vogue and read Teen Vogue if they needed to have something to say in groups. Now, I believe more of what I see in the banality of digging for loose change from the patterns of nothingness in my pockets, evidenced by the screeching horror in my voice as I stare at my balding head.  And I have no pal, paid or unpaid, to pull me out of arguments involving my position on the privatization of outer space vs. the amount of space I privatize on the queen size bed in the position I sleep.