December 29, 2005

don't let me be a robot

i don’t want to end up like this…though at an age younger than Darwin’s when he wrote this, i could relate, in reverse…guess (between art and science) which nauseates me now?
too harsh? i’m presently in a field which is not an evil in itself, but for me, and with the present set of circumstances, i could definitely glorify God somewhere else.

From Charles Darwin:
Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of many kinds…gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare....Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music....I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did....My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts....The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
(written December 28, 2005)

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