Inspired by comments about “intelligence,” I offer you an open forum on “genius.”
Genius is one of those words, esp. for writers artists etc, that carries heft to it. Most of us want to be genius, or at least the romanticized mythological version of genius, as if genius offers us validity as writers or something like that. Then, of course, there’s that link to insanity, addiction, and excess.
What are your conceptions of genius? What fairy tales and mythologies do you associate with the word?