At the beginning,
I thought that I’ll find polymaths
in the great scholars
and thinkers of the Renaissance
and of course the Enlightenment.
For me, it was an example
of serendipity
to find him
because he was from another century.
I discovered, by this way,
that the concept
of Renaissance man
was too restrictive.
I needed in fact the notion
of homo universalis
i.e. universal man.
But the only way to find
this specific notion
was to introduce
the universal genius.
It was the only solution
of this problem
and it became a paradigm.
And it was
much more rare
than I thought.
But it wasn’t a problem
as he was next to me
from the beginning.