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Tag Archives: Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin Decides to Marry

30 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History

≈ Comments Off on Charles Darwin Decides to Marry

Tags

"Is There a Secret to a Happy Marriage?", Adam Gopnik, and the Birth of the Modern Age, Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Charles and Emma Darwin, Charles Darwin, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Darwin, Diary, Emma Darwin, evolution, family, Journal, Love, marriage, Men and Women, On the Origin of the Species, sex

Richmond - Charles Darwin J980057

In late July of 1838, a twenty-nine-year-old Charles Darwin, mulling over his charmed courtship of cousin Emma Wedgwood, split two pages of his journal for a cost-benefit analysis in which he jotted the following:

“This is the Question [whether to marry or not].

Marry:

Children (if it Please God). Constant companion (& friend in old age) — who will feel interested in one. Object to be beloved & played with — better than a dog anyhow. Home, & someone to take care of house. Charms of music & female chit-chat — these things good for one’s health. But terrible loss of time.

My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.

Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.,

Not Marry

Freedom to go where one liked. Choice of Society & little of it. Conversation of clever men at clubs. Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.— To have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling. Loss of time. — cannot read in
the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. (But then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much.)

Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —

It being proved necessary to Marry.

Marry when? Soon or Late?

The Governor says soon for otherwise bad if one has children — one’s character is more flexible — one’s feelings more lively & if one does not marry soon, one misses so much good pure happiness.

But then if I married tomorrow: there would be an infinity of trouble & expense in getting & furnishing a house… Then how should I manage all my business if I were obliged to go every day walking with my wife.— Eheu!! I never should know French, or see the Continent, or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales — poor slave. — you will be worse than a negro. And then horrid poverty, (without one’s wife was better than an angel & had money). Never mind my boy —  Cheer up — One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless staring one in one’s face, already beginning to wrinkle. Never mind, trust to chance. Keep a sharp look out — there is many a happy slave.”

__________

Selections from the diaries of Charles Darwin, which you can find neatly summarized in Adam Gopnik’s short book Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Darwin, and the Birth of the Modern Age. And so the either-or above seemed to settle it. The Darwins were married on January 29th, 1829. 

Gopnik, a fluent, often funny writer and hyper-articulate storyteller, has produced several assessments of Darwin the man, the spouse, and the father. In his essay “Is There a Secret to a Happy Marriage?,” he hinges his theory of marriage on the relationship between Emma and Charles, opening:

Anyone who tells you their rules for a happy marriage doesn’t have one. There’s a truth universally acknowledged, or one that ought to be anyway.

Just as the people who write books about good sex are never people you would want to sleep with, and the academics who write articles about the disappearance of civility always sound ferociously angry, the people who write about the way to sustain a good marriage are usually on their third.

Gopnik goes on, quickly making his way to dissecting Darwin’s marriage:

What made it work? My theory is that happy marriages, from the Darwins on down, are made up of a steady, unchanging formula of lust, laughter and loyalty.

The Darwins had lust, certainly — 10 children in 17 years suggests as much anyway — and they had laughter. Emma loved to tease Charles about his passion, already evident in youth, for obsessive theorizing.

“After our marriage,” she wrote to him early on, “you will be forming theories about me, and if I am cross or out of temper you will only consider: ‘What does that prove?’ which will be a very philosophical way of considering it.”

And loyalty? Well, despite Emma’s Christian faith, she stood by him through all the evolutionary wars, and did for him the one thing only a loyal spouse can do — pretend he wasn’t in when German journalists came calling.

So, marriages are made of lust, laughter and loyalty — but the three have to be kept in constant passage, transitively, back and forth, so that as one subsides for a time, the others rise.

Read on:

  • The bachelor Alexander Hamilton describes his ideal date
  • J.R.R. Tolkien’s advice for finding the right girl
  • John F. Kennedy’s tumultuous courtship with Jackie

Darwin Journal - Marry

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Winston Churchill: The Simple, Complex Man

27 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on Winston Churchill: The Simple, Complex Man

Tags

Adolf Hitler, Aristotle, Arthur Schopenhauer, Britain, Charles Darwin, Fascism, history, Jock Colville, Labour Party, Maurice Maeterlinck, Nazism, Origin of Species, Paul Reid, Plato, Socialism, The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, The Life of the White Ant, Thomas Malthus, Tory Party, William Manchester, William Shakespeare, World War Two

winston-churchill31

“All who were with him then agree that the Old Man had more important matters on his mind than the sensitive feelings of subordinates. In any event, in time they came to adore him. Jock Colville later recalled, ‘Churchill had a natural sympathy for simple people, because he himself took a simple view of what was required; and he hated casuistry. That was no doubt why the man-in-the-street loved him and the intellectuals did not.’ Churchill, for his part, considered those on the left who anointed themselves the arbiters of right and wrong to be arrogant, ‘a fault,’ Colville recalled, Churchill ‘detested in others, particularly in its intellectual form.’ For that reason, Churchill ‘had dislike and contempt, of a kind which transcended politics, of the intellectual wing of the Labour party,’ which in turn despised Churchill. In 1940 the intellectualism of the left was inimical to Churchill and to Britain’s cause, which was simplicity itself: defeat Hitler.

Churchill cared little for obtuse political or social theories; he was a man of action: state the problem, find a solution, and solve the problem. For a man of action, however, he was exceptionally thoughtful and well read. When serving as a young subaltern in India, he amassed a private library that included Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Plato’s Republic, Schopenhauer on pessimism, Malthus on population, and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Reading, for Churchill, was a form of action. After a lifetime of reading — from the sea-adventuring Hornblower novels to the complete Shakespeare and Macaulay — he possessed the acumen to reduce complex intellectual systems and constructs and theories to their most basic essences. He once brought a wartime dinner conversation on socialism to an abrupt end by recommending that those present read Maurice Maeterlinck’s entomological study, The Life of the White Ant. ‘Socialism,’ Churchill declared, ‘would make our society comparable to that of the white ant.’ Case closed. Almost a decade later, when the Labour Party, then in power, nationalized British industries one by one, and when paper, meat, gasoline, and even wood for furniture were still rationed, Churchill commented: ‘The Socialist dream is no longer Utopia but Queuetopia.'”

__________

Excerpted from The Last Lion: Winston Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid.

More of the Old Man:

  • Manchester and Reid describe Churchill’s almost unbelievable level of energy as prime minister
  • Then the authors look at his herculean daily intake of booze
  • A quick anecdote of Winston in the restroom

Winston Churchill

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Define ‘Life’

02 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Charles Darwin, evolution, Future of Life on Earth, Life, natural selection, Origin, Philoctetes, Robert Pollack

Earth

Define life.

“I’ll give two answers. The first as a scientist and the second as a religious person. The first answer is: life is an event in the history of the universe, which, so far as we know, occurred in only one place, at only one time, about five billion years ago. Life has never ended, although it is dependent on the death of lives. So, lives are mortal in that life will be able to persist through natural selection and the emergence of novelty through selection of variance. So, I would say, life is mortal, persistent, on this planet, and so far as we know unique in the universe. It is also the source of our brains. As Darwin said, ‘the mind is an excretion of our brains.’ And in our brains are ideas — ideas including notions of free will and notions of altruistic obligation to strangers, which seem to be free of any natural selective advantage. So, I would say, life as we know it is an historical event that has generated us, and through us, the burdens of free will…

Why do you muddy the problem of definition by postulating things for which you have no evidence? In the evidence we have, life is tragic. It began, it persists, it requires the death of all individuals, including individuals capable of self-awareness of their own death. It’s tragic therefore individually for us, and on the global scale, it’s tragic because every hundred million years or so, a disaster enters from outer space, which obliterates 90% of the families of living things, and provides a design space for the emergence of new novelty. That is not… that is not a difficult definition to make.

Life is the evanescent moment for the individual and the persistence of DNA replication with variation for the global definition. They don’t match up for anyone who is alive and self-aware. That’s the problem.”

__________

Dr. Robert Pollack’s answer to the question “How do you define life?” at the Philoctetes discussion on Origin, Evolution, and the Future of Life on Earth.

Sorry… I know it’s heavy stuff for a Saturday afternoon.

But if you’re in the mood, the entire discussion, starting with Pollack’s opening, is below.

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