{"id":54182,"date":"2025-08-08T09:41:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T09:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/54182\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T09:41:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T09:41:07","slug":"helen-garner-and-dua-lipas-interview-caused-a-personal-crisis-how-can-i-be-quietly-intelligent-life-and-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/54182\/","title":{"rendered":"Helen Garner and Dua Lipa\u2019s interview caused a personal crisis. How can I be \u2018quietly intelligent\u2019? | Life and style"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australian author Helen Garner offered a compliment to the unbelievably talented and beautiful Dua Lipa in a recent interview<\/a> that has caused a somewhat personal crisis on my part.<\/p>\n

She described Lipa as \u201cquietly intelligent\u201d.<\/p>\n

How can I be this? I worry now upon reflection that my intellect is too loud. I value intelligence and am, by a long shot, not the smartest in my family or friendship circle (which I love and think is very important), but there are oft times when I meet new people or have interactions with clients that I\u2019ve thought, \u201cAh, cripes, I didn\u2019t need to say it like that, it sounds like I\u2019m showing off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eleanor says: I had a similar chat once with a friend who moved to the United States for her PhD around the same time I did. When we went back home and met new people, they\u2019d say: \u201cWhat do you do?\u201d We\u2019d say: \u201cPhD in America.\u201d They\u2019d say: \u201cCool, where?\u201d And we\u2019d wince about truthfully answering \u201cPrinceton\u201d. As though saying so came with a big studio placard: applause. Sometimes we\u2019d pretend the question was about geography and say \u201cNew Jersey\u201d instead. But we both quickly realised that was weirder \u2013 like what, the news that we\u2019re moderately clever is so trying for strangers back home that it\u2019s only polite to conceal it? For heaven\u2019s sake, with ego like that, what use is politeness?<\/p>\n

Point of the story: letting other people see your intelligence isn\u2019t necessarily patronising. Carefully concealing it as a favour to them sure is.<\/p>\n

I think the heart of your question is how to reveal intelligence in a way that doesn\u2019t feel like asserting hierarchy. And I think the heart of the answer is unsticking it from anything much about you.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a way of thinking about traits such as intelligence \u2013 or musicality, athleticism or anything we possess in different measures \u2013 as gifts that run through us, that don\u2019t really redound to our credit.<\/p>\n

This is not how we\u2019re taught to think about them. From when we\u2019re knee high we get on stage and clutch certificates rewarding us, such that \u201caren\u2019t you clever\u201d can feel synonymous with \u201caren\u2019t you marvellous\u201d. But these traits are largely heritable and the product of socioeconomic fortune. Hard work is involved, of course, but everyone with any kind of talent got it partly by being lucky.<\/p>\n

If you think of your traits as happy hits from the lottery stick, then it doesn\u2019t feel so wincey or rude to let them show. They\u2019re just gifts you happened to receive, and you can make life nicer and more beautiful by figuring out how to share them. Yo-Yo Ma doesn\u2019t refuse to play so as to avoid making other people feel bad.<\/p>\n

I think intelligence feels \u201cquiet\u201d in the Dua Lipa<\/a>, dignified way when it has this quality of generous sharing. It\u2019s about appreciating others\u2019 minds, and creating more beauty and interest for others. It looks straight through to an idea, to the world, not through a lens of: \u201cWhat does this say about me?\u201d<\/p>\n

In contrast, intelligence feels noisy and show-offy when its bearer clearly thinks it\u2019s an exciting feature of them that they have it. That\u2019s when it feels like the gifted child deliberately saying a long word for the grown-ups. And that\u2019s why it can be every bit as condescending to conceal it as to reveal it: the show-off and the mealy mouthed downplayer are both making the same egotistical mistake.<\/p>\n

Maybe the conversation between Dua Lipa and Helen Garner<\/a> that got you thinking about this is also a nice place to find an answer. Impressive women, sharing their intelligence with grace and generosity. Talent turned outwards for others, not angled in to shine mainly on its owner.<\/p>\n

Ask Eleanor a question<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australian author Helen Garner offered a compliment to the unbelievably talented and beautiful Dua Lipa in a recent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-54182","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}