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iPod photo: Guillermo Ruiz de Loizaga, via Flickr (CC license)
Charles Darwin mourned his lost ability to enjoy music and poetry. Would an iPod have helped? |
At the
Digital Life Design conference this week in Munich, futurist
John Naisbitt quoted
Charles Darwin, who wrote: "Up to the age of 30, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure. 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 also almost lost my taste for picture or music. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
"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. 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."
...To which moderator David Kirkpatrick of Fortune Magazine quipped: "Darwin needed an Ipod."
