Category: Chaos of Delight

On the 28th February 1832, as he voyaged on the Beagle, Charles Darwin wrote in his diary of the experience of being in a Brazilian rainforest.  He wrote, "The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind, if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over, if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future and more quiet pleasure will arise".

To us, it is one of Darwin's most beautiful passages and when interviewing over 150 people for The Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome, we asked most of our guests when they had experienced such a 'Chaos of Delight'.  Most of these mini-episodes have previously only been available to Cosmic Genome subscribers, some have never ever been seen before, but now we are releasing them here on Cosmic Shambles.  Enjoy.