Neuroplasticity

Charles Darwin wrote these words at the age of seventy-two:

"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....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 my 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...

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."

Many things could and, perhaps, should be said about these, Darwin's words. Yet, here, I only conjecture that the mind, detached from an understanding of the Absolute and invested in the effects of that Cause, cannot live. The brilliance and beauty fade out of all things. This is common among men. The young, devilish brutes they may be, have a curious reverence for reality--a fascination that the unanchored mind cannot accept indefinitely . As men grow old, they are forced to accept the natural conclusions to their unnatural perspective of reality. And everything turns to ash. Darwin laments this loss in himself: "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."

I, like Darwin, have a dim and perhaps faded view of beauty. Sometimes I fear that time will force me to watch the colors drain from the canvas. Yet I can hope, for my mind is anchored in the Absolute, the Cause. And I can hope for more than preservation of sight. Joy of joys, I hope for the expansion of that sight. I celebrate the knowledge that my understanding of everything weaves together in an understanding of God. As I know him more fully, I know all things more fully. The colors deepen and brighten. He gives understanding; my mind will not die.