Creativity (19 page)

Here it may be useful to make a distinction between the macroenvironment, the social, cultural, and institutional context in which a person lives, and the microenvironment, the immediate setting in which a person works. In terms of the broader context, it goes without saying that a certain amount of surplus wealth never hurts. The centers of creativity—Athens in its heyday; the Arab cities of the tenth century; Florence in the Renaissance; Venice in the fifteenth century; Paris, London, and Vienna in the nineteenth; New York in
the twentieth—were affluent and cosmopolitan. They tended to be at the crossroads of cultures, where information from different traditions was exchanged and synthesized. They were also loci of social change, often riven by conflicts between ethnic, economic, or social groups.

Not only states but also institutions can foster the development of creative ideas. The Bronx High School of Science and the Bell Research Laboratories have become legendary because of their ability to nurture important new ideas. Every university or think tank hopes to be the place that attracts future stars. Successful environments of this type provide freedom of action and stimulation of ideas, coupled with a respectful and nurturant attitude toward potential geniuses, who have notoriously fragile egos and need lots of tender, loving care.

Most of us cannot do a great deal about the macroenvironment. There is not that much we can do about the wealth of the society we live in, or even about the institutions in which we work. We can, however, gain control over the immediate environment and transform it so that it enhances personal creativity. On this score, there is much to learn from creative individuals, who generally take great pains to ensure that they can work in easy and uninterrupted concentration. How this is done varies greatly depending on the person’s temperament and style of work. The important thing,
however, is to have a special space tailor-made to one’s own needs, where one feels comfortable and in control. Kenneth Boulding preferred to think and work in a cabin overlooking the Colorado Rockies, and he also used to get into the hot tub intermittently to gather his thoughts. Jonas Salk liked to work in a studio where, in addition to the material he needed for writing on biology, there was a piano and an easel for painting. Hazel Henderson, who lives in a rather isolated community in north Florida to avoid the constant distractions of the urban centers, describes her daily routine:

Robertson Davies crafts his intricate fiction in a house he built fifty miles north of Toronto, on a prehistoric seashore rich in fossils, “in a very nice position looking down, down the valley toward Toronto so that we can see the lights and look toward it and be glad that we’re not there.” The sociologist Elise Boulding has worked out almost monastic routines to help the rhythm of her creative thinking:

In Finland many people know Pekka, an elderly Lapp whose official job is to supervise the social services in the northernmost part of the country. But Pekka also travels widely: He spends his vacations visiting Tibet to learn the beliefs and lifestyles of the monasteries, or Alaska, in search of the vanishing Inuit culture. When he is in Helsinki on government business, he is known for never sitting down until he feels that the office where the meeting is held feels right. If it does not, he will take the elevator down to the street, walk around until he finds some branches, or sto
nes, or flowers he likes. He will bring these objects back to the office, place them here and there on the desk or file cabinets, and when he feels that the environment looks serene and harmonious, he is ready to start business. Those who have to deal with Pekka generally feel that his
impromptu interior decoration also helps them to have a better meeting and come to more satisfying decisions.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, an innovative and successful German scientist and businesswoman (a few years ago, in a list of the one hundred most influential women in Germany published by a business magazine, she was ranked number two), has mastered the art of personalizing her environment. Her office, in a remodeled fifteenth-century farmhouse, is furnished with graceful antiques; her home on the shores of Lake Constance is filled with books and rare objects that reflect her personality. Because she spends so much time traveling from one place to another (about fifty thousand miles ev
ery year just by car), her Mercedes 500 is another important working space. While the chauffeur drives, Noelle-Neumann reads and writes surrounded by favorite audiotapes, bottles of mineral water, sheafs of notepaper, and bundles of ballpoint pens of various colors. Wherever she goes, she takes a familiar microenvironment with her.

To a certain extent everyone tries to accomplish something similar to what Elisabeth and Pekka do. We usually do it with our homes by filling them with objects that reflect and confirm our uniqueness. Such objects transform a house into a home. When we moved into a summer home in Montana, all it took to make the alien environment familiar was for my wife to place on the mantelpiece two colorful wooden ducks we had had for some time. With the ducks safely nesting along the wall, the empty space became immediately cozy and comfortable.

We need a supportive symbolic ecology in the home so that we can feel safe, drop our defenses, and go on with the tasks of life. And to the extent that the symbols of the home represent essential traits and values of the self, they help us be more unique, more creative. A home devoid of personal touches, lacking objects that point to the past or direct toward the future, tends to be sterile. Homes rich in meaningful symbols make it easier for their owners to know who they are and therefore what they should do.

In one of my studies we interviewed two women, both in their eighties, who lived on different floors of the same high-rise apartment house. When asked what objects were special to her in her apartment, the first woman looked vaguely around her living room, which could have passed for a showroom in a reasonably pricey furniture store, and said that she couldn’t think of anything. She gave the same response in the other rooms—nothing special, nothing per
sonal, nothing meaningful anywhere. The second woman’s living room was full of pictures of friends and family, porcelain and silver inherited from aunts and uncles, books she loved or that she intended to read. The hallway was hung with framed drawings of her children and grandchildren. In the bathroom the shaving tools of her deceased husband were arranged like a tiny shrine. And the life of the two women mirrored their homes: the first followed an affectless routine, the second a varied, exciting schedule.

Of course, furnishing one’s house in a certain way does not miraculously make one’s life more creative. The causal connections are, as usual, more complicated. The person who creates a more unique home environment is likely to be more original to begin with. Yet having a home that reinforces one’s individuality cannot but help increase the chances that one will act out one’s uniqueness.

It used to be said that a man’s home is his castle, in deference to the fact that at home one feels more secure and in control than anywhere else. But increasingly in our culture it could be said that a man’s—and especially a woman’s—car is the place where freedom, security, and control are most deeply experienced. Many people claim that their car is a “thinking machine,” because only when driving do they feel relaxed enough to reflect on their problems and to place them in perspective. One person we interviewed said that about once a month, when worries become too pressing, he gets in
to his car after work and drives for half the night from Chicago to the Mississippi. He parks and looks at the river for about half an hour, then drives back and reaches Chicago as the dawn lights up the lake. The long drive acts as therapy, helping him sort out emotional problems.

Cars can be personalized by a variety of means: The make we buy, the color, the accessories, and the music system all contribute to an at-home feeling in a vehicle that affords both privacy and mobility. In addition to cars, offices and gardens are spaces that can be arranged to provide environments that reflect a personal sense of how the universe ought to be. It is not that there is one perfect pattern by which to order our surroundings. What helps to preserve and develop individuality, and hence enhance creativity, is an environment that we have built to reflect ourselves, where
it is easy to forget the outside world and concentrate completely on the task at hand.

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It is not only through personalizing the material environment that we are able to enhance creative thought. Another very important way to do so is by ordering the patterns of action we engage in. Manfred Eigen, the Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, plays Mozart at the piano almost every day to take his mind off the linear track. So does the writer Madeleine L’Engle. Mark Strand walks his dog and works in the garden. Hazel Henderson, who struggles daily with the problems of the various environmental groups she helps organize, gardens and takes walks to refresh her thinking. Som
e ride bikes and some read novels; some cook and others swim. Again, there is no best way to structure our actions; however, it is important not to let either chance or external routine automatically dictate what we will do.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann rarely eats at the times other people usually eat but has her own strict schedule that fits her own needs. Richard Stern has

He goes on to specify in more concrete terms what he means by “rhythm”:

Most creative individuals find out early what their best rhythms are for sleeping, eating, and working, and abide by them even when it is tempting to do otherwise. They wear clothes that are comfortable, they interact only with people they find congenial, they do only things they think are important. Of course, such idiosyncrasies are not endearing to those they have to deal with, and it is not surprising that creative people are generally considered strange and difficult to get along with. But personalizing patterns of action helps to free the mind from the expectations that make
demands on attention and allows intense concentration on matters that count.

A similar control extends to the structuring of time. Some creative people have extremely tight schedules and can tell you in advance what they will be doing between three and four in the afternoon on a Thursday two months from today. Others are much more relaxed and in fact pride themselves on not even knowing what they will be doing later on today. Again, what matters is not whether one keeps to a strict or to a flexible schedule; what counts is to be master of one’s own time.

Longer stretches of time show the same variable structure. Freeman Dyson and Barry Commoner believe that one should make a major career change every ten years or so to avoid becoming stale. Others seem perfectly satisfied delving deeper and deeper into a narrow corner of their domain throughout their lives. But what none of the persons we interviewed ever said was that he or she did this or that because it was the socially expected thing to do at that particular time.

So it seems that surroundings can influence creativity in different ways, in part depending on the stage of the process in which a person is involved. During preparation, when one is gathering the elements out of which the problem is going to emerge, an ordered, familiar environment is indicated, where one can concentrate on interesting issues without the distractions of “real” life. For the scientist it is the laboratory, for the businessperson the office, for the artist the studio. At the next stage, when thoughts about the problem
incubate below the level of awareness, a different environment may be more helpful. The distraction of novel stimuli, of magnificent views, of alien cultures, allows the subconscious mental processes to make connections that are unlikely when the problem is pursued by the linear logic learned from experience. And after the unexpected connection results in an insight, the familiar environment is again more conducive for completing the process; evaluation and elaboration proceed more efficiently in the sober atmosphere where the logic of the domain prevails.