Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Dr. Heidegger's Experiment by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Dr. Heidegger's experiment is Nathaniel Hawthorne's take on the ancient archetype of the search for eternal youth. In the story, Dr. Heidegger invites four old friends to partake in the experiment. All four of them were old, miserable and dissatisfied with life, having squandered their youth. Dr. Heidegger offers them the chance to drink the water from the Fountain of Youth and return to their youth. However, when they drank the water, they did not value their regained youth; they kept doing the same things that the did when young.
We may laugh at how they keep on making the same mistakes, but many of us behave similarly. When we're young, we feel as if we have infinite time, so we act as if we would always be yound. However, once we're older and look back, many of us realize that we've just been wasting our youth.

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