re: High IQ and social awkwardness

quote:

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In our time, when men seem more than ever to confuse wisdom with knowledge and knowledge with information and to try to solve the problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism not of space but of time--one for which history is merely a chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and have been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no share. -- T.S. Eliot

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Thank you for posting that. I'd say it's even more true now than when he wrote it. It also calls to mind a couple of points where he riffs on that idea, if from a different angle, in The Four Quartets:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

and...

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

The last bit I pasted, coupled with your quote, come to mind as I think about current events and how various segments of society have turned to the past with mindless anger.

/hijack