Derek Paravicini: beautiful mind, big questions.

Yesterday my 7 y/o daughter & I had a chat about giftedness. After much discussion, we concluded that God has given each & every one of us gifts. It's our job to find out what ours are, & use them to the best of our ability. She ponders, then asks quietly, "If you do use your gift, does it ever run out?"

"Hmm...Does God ever run out?" I ask.

Do the mysteries of God ever, really, 'run out?' Then today, I meet Derek.

"Derek is 26. He doesn't know his left from right, & can barely count to 10. Like many people who cannot see, Derek has developed an acute sense of hearing...it has allowed him to flourish in ways that most of us could never imagine..."



"He's got extraordinarily developed analytic hearing, which I don't know of any parallels for."
"We know very little about what's inside Derek's head..."
"There are some pianists who can play a million notes a second & it doesn't mean anything, because it doesn't have any feeling in it. And there are other people who play the simplest thing & just sort of get you 'there,' you know, & Derek I think, has, importantly, has the ability to do both."

"Derek's talent is clear, but it raises questions. Where does genius like this come from? And how can it possibly coexist with such severe disabilities??"

Excellent questions; but wait, there's more:

"Derek possesses an extremely rare gift of Universal Absolute Pitch, which means he is able to discriminate every note he hears, much as we recognize different colors..."

~~

As for my 7 year old daughter, & her 2nd grade gifts, I feel fairly neat, rather tidy. But here's something I just can't answer,

"What does it means to be a musical genius in the wake of such a profound disability?"


I don't have much of an answer yet. Do you?

~~~