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
― Charles Darwin
***********
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
Comments
Post a Comment