4 Best The Genius Monologues – Opening Monologue

The Genius (The Boy)

Category: Play Role: The Boy From: The Genius

The Boy says

It isn’t that, with me. I can’t write…. I had one splendid teacher. He used to talk about things right in class. He said that most educated people think that intellect is a matter of making fine distinctions -of seeing as two separate points what the unintelligent would believe was one point; but that this idea was finicky. He wanted us to see that intelligence might also be a matter of seeing the connection between two things so far apart that most people would think they were always separate. I like that. It made education mean something, because it made it depend on imagination instead of grubbing. And then he told us about the history of our subject -grammar. How it began as poetry, when every word was an original creation; and then became philosophy, as people had to arrange speech with thought; and then science, with more or less exact, laws. I could see it -the thing became alive. And he said all knowledge passed through the same stages, and there isn’t anything that can’t eventually be made scientific. That made me think a good deal. I wondered if somebody couldn’t work out a way of preventing anybody from being poor. It seems so unnecessary, with so much work being done. That’s what I want to do. Thanks to you, I –

The Genius (The Boy)

Category: Play Role: The Boy From: The Genius

The Boy says

Well, maybe I’m wrong, but whenever I think of the Old Testament I see an old man under a tree -A man who has lived it all through, you know, and found out something real about it; and he sits there calm and strong, something like a tree himself; and every once in a while somebody comes along -a boy, you know, the boy talks to him all about himself, just as we imagine we’d like to with our fathers, if they weren’t so busy, or our teachers, if they didn’t depend so much upon books, or our ministers, if we thought they would really understand, the old man doesn’t say much maybe, but the boy goes away much stronger and happier….What I can’t understand is how nowadays people seem more grown up and competent than those men were, in a way, and we do such wonderful things -skyscrapers and aeroplanes -and yet we aren’t half so wonderful as they were in the Old Testament with their jugs and their wooden plows. I mean, we aren’t near so big as the things we do, while those old fellows were so much bigger. We smile at them, but if some day one of our machines fell over on us what would we do about it?

The Genius (The Man)

Category: Play Role: The Man From: The Genius

The Man says

Brilliance -I’ll tell you what that was, at least for me. I wrote several things that people called “brilliant.” One in particular, a little play of decadent epigram. It was acted amateurs before an admiring “select” audience. That was when I was twenty-one. From about sixteen on I had been acutely miserable -physically miserable. I never knew when I wouldn’t actually cave in. I felt like a bankrupt living on borrowed money. Of course, it’s plain enough now -the revolt of starved nerves. I cared only for my mind, grew only in that, and the rest of me withered up like a stalk in dry soil. So the flower drooped too -in decadent epigram. But nobody pointed out the truth of it all to me, and I scorned to give my body a thought. People predicted a brilliant future -for me, crying inside! Then I married. I married the girl who had taken the star part in the play. According to the logic of the situation, it was inevitable. Everybody remarked how inevitable it was. A decorative girl, you know. She wanted to be the wife of a great man…. Well, we didn’t get along. There was an honest streak in me somewhere which hated deception. I couldn’t play the part of “brilliant” young poet with any success. She was at me all the while to write more of the same thing. And I didn’t want to. The difference between the “great” man I was supposed to be and the sick child I really was, began to torture. I knew I oughtn’t to go on any further if I wanted to do anything real. Then one night we had an “artistic” dinner. My wife had gotten hold of a famous English poet, and through him a publisher. The publisher was her real game. I drank champagne before dinner so as to be “brilliant.” I was. And before I realized it, Norah had secured a promise from the publisher to bring out a book of plays. I remember she said it was practically finished. But it wasn’t, only the one, and I hated that. But I sat down conscientiously to write the book that she, and apparently all the world that counted, expected me to write. Well, I couldn’t write it. Not a blessed word! Something inside me refused to work. And there I was. In a month or so she began to ask about it. Norah thought I ought to turn them out while she waited. I walked up and down the park one afternoon wondering what to tell her…. And when I realized that either she would never understand or would despise me, I grew desperate. I wrote her a note, full of fine phrases about “incompatibility,” her “unapproachable ideals,” the “soul’s need of freedom” -things she would understand and wear a heroic attitude about -and fled. I came here….

The Genius (The Man)

Category: Play Role: The Man From: The Genius

The Man says

A man’s life is a rhythm. Eating, sleeping, working, playing, loving, thinking -everything. And when we live so that each activity comes at the right interval, we gain power. When one interrupts another, we lose. Weakness is merely the thrust of one impulse against another, instead of their combined thrust against the world. When I came here, feeling like a criminal, I was obeying the one right instinct in a welter of emotions. It was like the faintest of heart beats in a sick body. I listened to that. Then I learned physical hunger, then sleep, and so on. It’s incredible how stupid I was about the elemental art of living! I had to begin all over from the beginning, as if no one had ever lived before. Exactly! I learned that “good” is the rhythm of the man’s personal nature, and that “evil” is merely the confusion of the same impulses. As time went on it became instinctive to live for and the rhythm. Everything about my life here was caught up and used in the vision of power -drawing water, cutting wood, digging in the garden, dawn. It was all marvelous -I couldn’t help writing those poems. They are the natural joys and sorrows of ten years. As a matter of fact, though, I grew to care less and less about writing, as living became fuller and richer. People write too much. They would write less if they had to make the fire in the morning.