Fear of the Light


“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Mil­ton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shel­ley, gave me great plea­sure, and even as a school­boy I took intense delight in Shake­speare, espe­cially in the his­tor­i­cal plays. I have also said that 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 lately to read Shake­speare, and found it so intol­er­a­bly dull that it nau­se­ated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pic­tures or music.  Music gen­er­ally sets me think­ing too ener­get­i­cally on what I have been at work on, instead of giv­ing me plea­sure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquis­ite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, nov­els which are works of the imag­i­na­tion, though not of a very high order, have been for years a won­der­ful relief and plea­sure to me, and I often bless all nov­el­ists. A surprising num­ber have been read aloud to me, and I like all if mod­er­ately good, and if they do not end unhap­pily– against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, accord­ing to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it con­tains some per­son whom one can thor­oughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.

This curi­ous and lam­en­ta­ble loss of the higher aes­thetic tastes is all the odder, as books on his­tory, biographies, and trav­els (inde­pen­dently of any sci­en­tific facts which they may con­tain), and essays on all sorts of sub­jects inter­est me as much as ever they did.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grind­ing gen­eral laws out of large col­lec­tions of facts, but why this should have caused the atro­phy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I can­not con­ceive. A man with a mind more highly organ­ised or bet­ter con­sti­tuted than mine, would not, I sup­pose, have thus suf­fered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and lis­ten to some music at least once every week; for per­haps the parts of my brain now atro­phied would thus have been kept active through use.

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.”

Charles Darwin

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Dear Kate,

Near his life's end, Charles Darwin gave a state of his being in an autobiography.  The words above were meant for his children.  A cautionary tale for them to "survive" better?

Here's a brilliant man, with a genuine interest to pursue truth, an honesty enough to face it.  His mind was trapped in a sort of "grinding mechanism," but he was still earnest enough to describe it and offer a possible explanation for his "suffering," "loss of happiness," "intellectual and moral injuries," and "enfeebled emotion."  He thought, at the time anyway, that it's because his mind wasn't "organ­ised" highly enough, "con­sti­tuted" well enough to savor the "higher tastes."

I respect his atheism (if it in fact was that, God knows).  He could have said poetry and music and novels never should have mattered to him that much anyway, that it was "enfeebled" of him earlier in his life to succumb to the frivolous stimulations of these trivialities.  No, old as he was then, he was still child-like enough to speak the truth about himself: that he was "losing" something "higher," and the loss was "curi­ous" and "lam­en­ta­ble."

We are living in a thoroughly mechanicalized secular world.  Our politicians and scientists are blind, though most, I do trust, have good intention to usher in a better future.  But when the world we conceive in our "atrophied" minds is a closed system of WYSIWYG, no amount of good will or genuine effort can open the sky for us to glimpse at the transcending beyond, a "higher" reality that doesn't scorn our finitude but deepens it, gives our delimited efforts the reach of eternity and, thus, true meanings.

"Opening the sky," such is the metaphor I gave you just now, not one you've heard so far in this pandemic.  In fact, trapped in our atrophied mind, injured intellect, damaged moral, and enfeebled emotion (all Darwin's autobiographic descriptions that we are not willing to admit about ourselves), the only metaphor we are left with is that we are all waiting for (and waiting on) "the light at the end of the tunnel."   It's astonishing how, as impoverished are we are inside and out, the last metaphor standing is still speaking the most primitive language about our first fear--of the dark.

I don't expect enlightenment from a closed system that is our society.  Sports bars and fitness centers are life-giving, essential services, that's how we see them, that's how our leaders see how we see the world, and the System is running to keep us trapped likewise.  Spiritual matter is a load of baloney, pandemic or not, tolerable when we can spare our patience, but with an "unprecedented" crisis going on, let's grow up, keep it real and cut the crap for now, can we?  Religions add no value, and likely will cause damage if we allow them to pull us backward, we can all agree in this technocracy.  We should just discard our single and last metaphor and bow down before the pantheon of vaccines.

Again, I don't think any scientist or politician meant any harm.  Yet it is also true that they are blind--not fully, none of us are, but blind enough to not be able to speak like Darwin.

But you know what is the real devastation?  That the so-called "religious" people can no longer see any light either and are now bowing down to the same idols.  I have never learned more about "my people" than in this last year.

Yours, Alex

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