annot 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.... 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.... 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 would thus have been kept alive 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."

We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the
destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to
grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in
touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the
greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view.
We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men
and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled? Surely,
in comparatively few; and the laws of habit show us why. Some interest
in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age; but, if
not persistently fed with the appropriate matter, instead of growing
into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by
the rival interests to which the daily food is given. We make ourselves
into Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the
essential practical conditions of our case. We say abstractly: "I mean
to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to
keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to
the thought of my time, to keep my higher spiritual side alive, etc."
But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin
_to-day. _We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be
paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until
those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of
poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at
music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began _now_ and suffered no
remissi