Mind is not what, but how. This is the ability to measure three things: the strength of one’s beliefs and statements, the significance and relevance of the subject, the horizons and involvement of the interlocutor.
A person who puts the Gullivers’ work of mind into communicating with Lilliputians or in discussing Lilliputian topics is hardly so smart. Chatsky, according to Pushkin, speaks smartly, but he himself is not at all smart: “The first sign of a smart person is to know at first glance who you are dealing with, and not to cast pearls in front of the Repetilovs and the like.” The mind can be perceived at a glance, purely physiognomically. Mind is a kind of muscularity, composure and at the same time openness of the face when it does the work of communication and communication. A stupid face looks like either a fountain continuously spewing something out of itself, or like cotton wool, which is saturated with someone else’s moisture and immediately spreads. A smart face is a movable sponge that absorbs and pours out, all the time processing something in itself.
What is more important is not how smart we are able to say, but how stupid we cannot afford.
The measure of cleverness is determined not by how smart a person is able to say, but by what stupidity he cannot afford. N says a lot of clever things, but at the same time he is profoundly stupid, because he does not distinguish his cleverness from his own stupidity, while the first sign of intelligence is to distinguish. It happens that a person has only one mental ability or even one part of the body is smart. There are women who are smart in their maternal concerns or in their material tastes (dressing, hosting, home furnishing) but not too smart in everything else. There are people with smart hands (craftsmen), smart ears (musicians) or smart eyes (artists), who in many other ways show no intelligence.
It is not at all necessary that one person be all smart and the other always stupid. A person who is invariably smart in his business, in his profession, may turn out to be stupid in various forms of social communication, for example, in a restaurant feast, when a sign of intelligence is to say funny and even funny stupid things. He hangs out in front of the toastmaster, whose little jokes themselves fly off the tongue, come out extremely cleverly and appropriately. People who speak clumsily, sparsely, and even not at all original can be very smart. At a meeting of young writers in 1975, I remember Boris Slutsky and Bulat Okudzhava, who jointly led a poetry seminar.
Slutsky tirelessly spoke, lectured, poetically commissar — and was very smart. Okudzhava remained silent or said indistinct and quite trivial things, such as “good”, “interesting”. Nevertheless, it was felt that he was no more stupid than Slutsky, he just had a different mind, let’s say, lyrical, musical. Or: Slutsky has a hearty mind, Okudzhava has a smart heart. If we want to be smart, we need to determine what we are smarter in and be proportionate to the situation. You shouldn’t dance at a funeral, even if you’re a dancer of the highest class.