The Plan
Right at the start, Darwin turns to metaphor as means of explaining his plans for going about writing the story of his life:
“I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life.”
Dr. Butler's School
In 1818, Darwin was sent to study at a school in Shrewsbury operated by Dr. Butler and spent the next seven years attending classes. Apparently, all for naught, because for Darwin manner of learning:
“school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.”
A Transformation in Aesthetics
Darwin the curious fact that in his later years, he had lost the capacity to enjoy aesthetic works that as a younger man he consumed and appreciated in a broad man. On the other hand, his enjoyment of non-fiction like history, biographies and travel literature remains just as fascinating as they ever were. He finally concludes that:
“My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts”
A Great Loss
Although admitting that reading the same Shakespearean works which delighted him as a younger man nauseate him as an older man, Darwin is wistful and melancholy about the changes which took place within regarding appreciation of works of creative aesthetics, reflecting metaphorically on the broader implication of this modification of character:
“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.”
The Body Snatchers
In an anecdote meant to illustrate the depth of compassion within his friend Professor Henslow, Darwin describes coming across the grotesque sight of two recently apprehended graverobbers, muddy and bloody and bearing the bruises of attacks against them by ever-increasing crowd of onlookers. The point of the anecdote is to describe Henslow’s compassionate reaction to seeing the reaction of the crowd to two men who”
“looked like corpses, but the crowd was so dense that I got only a few momentary glimpses of the wretched creatures. Never in my life have I seen such wrath painted on a man’s face as was shown by Henslow at this horrid scene.”
