Bob Geldof wrote in the song “Room 19”, “When I woke up I was freezing / I was stuck up on a shelf / with the other guys in room 19 / Tchaikovsky played the music, Pasternak wrote the poetry / Lenin never shut up talking, and every talk became a speech.”
The idea that the brains of these Great Russian thinkers and artists, preserved in glass jars on a shelf in room 19 waiting to be studied, is an interesting one. It begets the question: What makes great thinkers and great artists? Does it really have to do with the brain and intellect? Do these people really have superior brains? Perhaps it has less to do with the brain and more to do with the heart. (Although this view could simply be a result of my diminished brainpower. Please read on.)
From the earliest of man’s history, the heart has being used in a figurative sense referring to the inner man. “Among the Semites . . . all that was peculiar to man, in the category of feelings as well as intellect and will, was attributed to the heart.” It is “the sum total of the interior man as opposed to the flesh, which is the exterior and tangible man.” - The Metaphorical Use of the Names of Parts of the Body in Hebrew and in Akkadian, by E. Dhorme, Paris, 1963, pp. 113, 114, 128 (in French).
History tells us that Napoleon Bonaparte once ordered his own army to stand still while he rode ahead to face the opposing army of 6,000. He dismounted and walked up to the barrier of men and their guns. Their commander ordered them to fire, but in awe of the man standing before them, not one shot was fired. There is no question that Napoleon Bonaparte was a bold and courageous man, and whether for the good or bad, he changed the course of human history.
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