Notes from my visit to the Darwin exhibit this morning. The Field Museum, Chicago, IL.
On the thrill of observation:
"The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind,-if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over. The mind is a chaos of delight."
On the theory of evolution:
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
On the pros and cons of marriage:
"Children-(if it Please God), Constant companion (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, Object to be beloved and played with, Better than a dog, anyhow, Home & someone to take care of house, Charms of music and female chit-chat...These things good for one's health, but terrible loss of time." -- Charles Darwin (July, 1838)
On Darwin:
"He is the most open, transparent man I ever saw, and every word expresses his real thoughts. He is particularily affectionate...and possesses some minor qualities that add particularily to one's happiness, such as not being fastidious and being humane to animals."
-- Emma Darwin, wife of Charles Darwin (1838)
1 comment:
this post brings to mind two recent articles I blazed through from the same periodical, the NYer: one about a predecessor and contemporary of Darwin, from whom the phrase "survival of the fittest" was lifted, who was hailed as "not only the profoundest thinker of our time, but the most capacious and most powerful intellect of all time" by one Columbia University president (and other such pronouncements from many other intellectuals), and most interestingly, whose ideas were employed wrongly as justification for the burgeoning free-market capitalism and commensurate American outlook in the late 1800s. His name was Herbert Spencer. Alternately, Darwin's comments on the thrill of observations led me to recall reading an adult's retrospective account of his own life with Asperger's sydnrome, a condition which is at times debatably one at all, and which at its worst is essentially autism. Both great articles to check out.
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