Still, the achievements of genius have a millennial enduring power. At the same time they defy attempts to explain them, even though we need some general notion of a genius in order to imagine attributes that are super-human. Yet the essential thing about the actual works of genius is that they hide or eliminate all the traces of the labour that went into them. There's no way of doing without the inspiration, of course. But that's less important than what the genius makes of it, through exhaustive work and an obsessive attention to detail, going on for years and years.
Patience is as important a virtue as ingenuity, perhaps even more so.
Every genius works hard, though not everyone who perspires is a genius. So too in the genius do we find a unique blend of complexity and simplicity, as in Joyce's Ulysses , a family story that is downright common but elevated, like Homer's Odyssey or Sophocles's Oedipus , to the most transcendent complexity. Yet all these gifts must be deployed through the expenditure of hard work, that fulfilling of a task which requires unique concentration and obsessive concern. The clearest examples of this usually overlooked aspect of genius are musical. Johann Sebastian Bach, surely the towering figure in the whole history of Western classical music, had an astonishingly rich capacity for working more out of a theme or melody than anyone.