EVOLUCION Y ECOLOGIA HUMANAS
Debemos agradecer a los miserables que nos recuerden a cada instante que la evolución humana no ha podido, hasta la fecha, prescindir de ellos y que la única utopía sería actuar como si no fueran parte del milieu.
CHARLES DARWIN EN DOWNE ALREDEDOR DE 1880 (POEMA)
Vestido con la autoridad del negro, un capellán del demonio con barba blanca,
te paras siniestro en tu galería. La enredadera a tu derecha no tiene hojas,
debe de ser otoño, quizás invierno, cada brote en esa rama ha sido observado.
Moisés ha descendido de la montaña y está incomodo entre los peces
que aletearon de charca en charca y que luego heredarían la tierra.
Toda esa charlatanería victoriana: las curas de agua fría al amanecer, la piel
remojada y estirada con vinagre y los sorbos de agua ozonizada.Han arrugado
tu rostro, produjeron bolsas bajo tus ojos y te han convertido en un demacrado y viejo evolucionista.
Cuando era joven, Fitzroy advirtió que tu nariz carecía de energía y determinación.
¿Qué pensaría de ella ahora? Ella también ha evolucionado, sólo los ojos están separados
espiando las especies bajo tu frente de escarabajo.
Darwin, un sujeto renuente pero blando, un retrato sobre la repisa de mi chimenea,
contemplando más allá de tu siglo. Bebido,te he hecho pasar ante las visitas por mi abuelo. ¿Paterfamilias, se rompió tu rutina ese día? Te habrá llevado semanas reordenarla.
Esa caminata diaria, el sendero Sandwalk del pensamiento, donde me dijeron que las
crías de ardilla se treparon a tu espalda, confundiéndote con algo más lento y más amigable
que un hombre.Caminaste preocupado entre los cerezos, los avellanos y los carpes
plantados por tu mano. Desde la galería esos árboles se ven crecidos,han alcanzado
la altura de las cúspides. Tu ojo derecho ve que la naturaleza es pródiga, el izquierdo,
perezoso y de reojo,discierne el torpe y destructor movimiento de todo ello.
JOSEPH WOODS
(Traducción de Esteban Moore)
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 any 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 containssome person whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be 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 could 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.
(DARWIN: AUTOBIOGRAFIA)
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