Editing Genius The Transgression/Chapter One: The Cosmos (section)

===First Principles===
''Behold My Genius''

A genius is a mortal man or woman gifted with extraordinary insight and technical brilliance. A genius is also a concept, an extra-worldly thing, a muse, an eidolon of imagination and beauty, something that alights for a time upon mortals or, sometimes, buries itself deep in the soul of a person and does not leave.

This double-truth follows a genius through life: are they extraordinary individuals gifted with a touch of the impossible, or are they mere conduits for a greater and inhuman power? This question torments many of the Inspired, and they pore over the accounts of their predecessors and propose monstrous and baffling philosophies in order to learn what they are: gifted mortals, or mere shells for the idea of genius? Every genius must ask herself, at some point, am I real? And they must discover for themselves the origin and true nature of their ideas. Are they Inspired, or are they Inspiration personified? Where do the terrible, beautiful ideas come from, if not from their own mind? Are they, in some sense, worthy of the wonders they make, or 
are they mere midwives for things more beautiful than they―things in some sense, more real?

As a genius grows in power and experience, traditional notions of causality and responsibility can break down, stripping that question of meaning, but many Inspired fear such a fate. Something burns brightly within them, and it can burn away who they are entirely, eclipsing their own minds with a shining thing, a divine thing, that can hollow them out and use them for their own ends. A genius instead clings to those human questions, those not-transcendent concerns. For every young genius who rails at the chains raised around his ambitions, who spits at the world for denying him respect, equipment, peace of mind, there is a seasoned wonder-worker who has discovered that those pitiful mortal frustrations, the tedium of paying the 
utility bill, of deflecting accusations from one's unInspired friends, of just getting out of the lab for a night and talking to frail, grubby little humans about frail, grubby human things, is all that limits the luminous thing within from burning through the back of their eyes and pouring out into the world.

Some never learn that lesson. They become Inspiration. Their fate is sad, and sometimes beautiful.