“Too many giants of higher culture, in the fields of art, science, philosophy, politics, religion, etc. were childless to mention. “
And that’s a shame. Too many good people don’t have kids, and way too many bad people have plenty.
“Idiocracy” isn’t just a movie, it’s a warning.
If you restrict yourself to the “good” you have a point. I was speaking of greatness, however. Geniuses may be born, but they require the sort of fanatical work and unhealthy obsession that puts off regular people. Like I said, the list of childless great historical thinkers and intellectual doers is too long to list. But I can excerpt a list from a book I read recently:
Newton, Faraday, Mendel, Vivaldi, Handel, Beethoven, Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Plato, Aquinas, Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Mill. On a slightly lower plane he puts Copernicus, Swift, Smith, Haydn, Johnson, Dalton, and Galton (Francis, who directly related to the subject of the book).
You may find, as I do, deep melancholy in the thought that there could’ve been two world renowned Beethoven sons had he sired a CPE and a JC, as did JS Bach. Then again, maybe there’d be no 9th symphony, Missal Solemnis, or Hammerklavier sonata had Beethoven been the marrying type.
If you restrict yourself to the “good” you have a point. I was speaking of greatness, however. Geniuses may be born, but they require the sort of fanatical work and unhealthy obsession that puts off regular people. Like I said, the list of childless great historical thinkers and intellectual doers is too long to list. But I can excerpt a list from a book I read recently:
Newton, Faraday, Mendel, Vivaldi, Handel, Beethoven, Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Plato, Aquinas, Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Mill. On a slightly lower plane he puts Copernicus, Swift, Smith, Haydn, Johnson, Dalton, and Galton (Francis, who directly related to the subject of the book).
You may find, as I do, deep melancholy in the thought that there could’ve been two world renowned Beethoven sons had he sired a CPE and a JC, as did JS Bach. Then again, maybe there’d be no 9th symphony, Missal Solemnis, or Hammerklavier sonata had Beethoven been the marrying type.
Sorry, that’s Missa Solemnis, not “missal”